Travail et économie publique : Publications

We propose a two-stage experiment in which people receive feedback about their relative intelligence. This feedback is a noisy message reminded at every stage, so that subjects cannot forget this ego-relevant information. Instead, we exogenously vary whether the informativeness of the message is reminded in the second stage. We investigate how this treatment variation affects the informativeness reported by subjects, and their posterior beliefs about their intelligence. We show that subjects report informativeness in a self-serving way: subjects with negative messages report that these messages are significantly less informative in the absence of reminder than with it. We also show that the lack of reminder about message informativeness allows subjects to keep a better image of themselves. These results are confirmed by complementary treatments in which we decrease messages informativeness: subjects tend to inflate the informativeness of positive messages that should now be interpreted as bad news.

Equivalence scales (ES) are widely used to compare income levels across different households.

Yet the commonly used OECD and square-root scales rely on assumptions about household economies of scale that lack robust empirical support. Using responses to the Minimum Income Question (MIQ) from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, we construct subjective ES based on panel data, rather than relying on pooled OLS as in most previous studies, allowing us to track how income needs evolve within households over time instead of comparing different households. The economies of scale in this subjective scale are notably different from those in traditional ES, and these differences have a substantial effect on the levels and distribution of equivalised income. Based on our empirical findings, we propose a simple alternative to conventional ES and illustrate its implications for poverty and inequality, both within and across countries. Our results show that the choice of equivalence scale significantly influences not only the estimated levels of these variables but also country rankings in comparative analyses.

We here use European Social Survey data to disentangle the ‘inherited’ and ‘contextual’ components of resilience, following the approaches taken in Alesina and Giuliano (2010) and Luttmer and Singhal (2011). We suggest that the inherited part of resilience reflects culture in the country of birth, while the contextual part captures both institutions and culture in the country where the individual currently resides. We separately identify these two components via a sample of immigrants, for whom the birth and residence countries differ. We find that resilience is both inherited and contextual, with the latter component being the most important. The ‘inherited’ component of resilience is larger for men and those who do not have citizenship in their residence country. We last present some evidence from second-generation immigrants of the intergenerational transmission of inherited cultural resilience.

We here use UK data and exploit the State Pension eligibility age to establish the causal effect of parental retirement on adult children’s well-being in a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design analysis. Maternal retirement increases adult children’s life and income satisfaction by 0.20 standard deviations in the short run. These impacts are stronger for adult children with lower incomes, with young children of their own, and who live close to their retired parents. We emphasise the critical role of intergenerational time transfers from retired mothers in enhancing their adult children’s well-being.

We study the effects of the SRU law introduced in France in December 2000 to support scattered development of public housing in cities and favor social mixity. This law imposes 20% of public dwellings to all medium and large municipalities of large-enough cities, with fees for those not abiding by the law. Using exhaustive fiscal data, we evaluate the effects of the law over the 1996-2008 period using a difference-in-differences approach at the municipality and neighborhood levels. We find that the law stimulated public housing construction in treated municipalities, but only slightly increased the presence of low-income households. Indeed, new public dwellings enter categories to which medium-income are eligible and most additional occupants are not poor. Within municipalities, the policy decreased public housing segregation but it barely decreased low-income segregation. This comes from local authorities increasing over time the presence of public dwellings in neighborhoods away from existing public housing but in places concentrating low-income households.

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.

Subjective wellbeing data are increasingly used across the social sciences. Yet, despite the widespread use of such data, the predictive power of approaches commonly used to model wellbeing is only limited. In response, we here use tree-based Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to provide a better understanding of respondents’ self-reported wellbeing. We analyse representative samples of more than one million respondents from Germany, the UK, and the United States, using data from 2010 to 2018. We make three contributions. First, we show that ML algorithms can indeed yield better predictive performance than standard approaches, and establish an upper bound on the predictability of wellbeing scores with survey data. Second, we use ML to identify the key drivers of evaluative wellbeing. We show that the variables emphasised in the earlier intuition- and theory-based literature also appear in ML analyses. Third, we illustrate how ML can be used to make a judgement about functional forms, including the existence of satiation points in the effects of income and the U-shaped relationship between age and wellbeing.

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

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

Whether individuals feel confident about their own actions, choices, or statements being correct, and how these confidence levels differ between individuals are two key primitives for countless behavioral theories and phenomena. In cognitive tasks, individual confidence is typically measured as the average of reports about choice accuracy, but how reliable is the resulting characterization of within-and between-individual confidence remains surprisingly undocumented. Here, we perform a large-scale resampling exercise in the Confidence Database to investigate the reliability of individual confidence estimates, and of comparisons across individuals’ confidence levels. Our results show that confidence estimates are more stable than their choice-accuracy counterpart, reaching a reliability plateau after roughly 50 trials, regardless of a number of task design characteristics. While constituting a reliability upper-bound for task-based confidence measures, and thereby leaving open the question of the reliability of the construct itself, these results characterize the robustness of past and future task designs.

Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.com who played an incentivized tax evasion game online. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, though experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths were effective in curbing dishonesty, but their effectiveness varied depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.

We derive wage equations with individual specific coefficients from a structural model of human capital investment over the life cycle. This model allows for interruptions in labour market participation and deals with missing data and attrition problems. We propose a new framework that deals with missingness at random and is based on factor decompositions that allow for flexible control of selection. Our approach leads to an interactive effect wage specification, which we estimate using long administrative panel data on male wages in the private sector in France. A structural function approach shows that interruptions negatively affect average wages. Interestingly, they also negatively affect the inter-decile range of wages after twenty years. This is only partly due to the fact that interruptions are endogenous.

This report presents a proposal for an internationally coordinated standard ensuring an effective taxation of ultra-high-net-worth individuals. In the baseline proposal, individuals with more than $1 billion in wealth would be required to pay a minimum amount of tax annually, equal to 2% of their wealth. This standard could be flexibly implemented by participating countries through a variety of domestic instruments, including a presumptive income tax, an income tax on a broad notion of income, or a wealth tax. The report presents evidence that contemporary tax systems fail to tax ultra-high-net-worth individuals effectively, clarifies the case for international coordination to address this issue, analyzes implementation challenges, and provides revenue estimations. The main conclusions are that (i) building on recent progress in international tax cooperation, such a common standard has become technically feasible; (ii) it could be enforced successfully even if all countries did not adopt it, by strengthening current exit taxes and implementing “tax collector of last resort” mechanisms as in the coordinated minimum tax on multinational companies; (iii) a minimum tax on billionaires equal to 2% of their wealth would raise $200-$250 billion per year globally from about 3,000 taxpayers; extending the tax to centimillionaires would add $100-$140 billion; (iv) this international standard would effectively address regressive features of contemporary tax systems at the top of the wealth distribution; (v) it would not substitute for, but support domestic progressive tax policies, by improving transparency about top-end wealth, reducing incentives to engage in tax avoidance, and preventing a race to the bottom; (vi) its economic impact must be assessed in light of the observed pre-tax rate of return to wealth for ultra-high-net-worth individuals which has been 7.5% on average per year (net of inflation) over the last four decades, and of the current effective tax rate of billionaires, equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth.

In this unique work, Thomas Piketty presents a synthesis of his historical and comparative research on inequality. He challenges the idea that there could be natural inequalities and shows that the march toward equality has always depended on political and social struggles, addressing diverse topics such as: education, inheritance, the climate crisis, the taxation of wealth, and gender disparities. Adapted from Piketty’s 2022 lecture at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Nature, Culture, and Inequality makes his important argument available to a wider audience for the first time. With a clear, conversational tone, he provides a strong foundation of data and concrete examples of how we can continue to level the playing field.

« Le XXe siècle a été le siècle de la social-démocratie. Le XXIe siècle sera celui du socialisme écologique, démocratique et participatif. L’affirmation peut surprendre en ces temps où un inquiétant mélange de repli identitaire et de néolibéralisme résigné semble l’emporter un peu partout. Et pourtant je reste optimiste, encore et toujours. L’égalité est un combat qui peut être gagné, qui a été gagné dans le passé et qui le sera encore à l’avenir. À condition de bien mesurer toutes les transformations institutionnelles que cela implique, de tirer toutes les leçons des stratégies politiques qui en découlent, et surtout de ne jamais abandonner à d’autres les questions sociales et économiques et les réflexions sur le système socioéconomique alternatif. Ce sont des questions éminemment politiques, sur lesquelles tous les citoyens se doivent d’avoir une opinion et de s’engager. C’est en renversant les rapports de savoir et de pouvoir et en reprenant le cours des mobilisations sociales et collectives que la marche vers l’égalité et la dignité pourra reprendre ses droits et que la parenthèse nationale-libérale pourra être refermée. » T.P Après Vivement le socialisme ! Chroniques 2016-2020,Thomas Piketty partage ses réflexions développées dans ses chroniques pour Le Monde et son blog, de la crise du Covid jusqu’à la guerre à Gaza. Il analyse les événements politiques qui secouent la planète, bousculent l’Europe et l’espace national, ouvrant des perspectives de changement. Précédé d’une préface inédite, ce recueil comprend l’ensemble des chroniques publiées par Thomas Piketty entre juillet 2020 et septembre 2024.

Un pacte budgétaire et fiscal européen face aux crises

We consider a linear panel data model with nonseparable two-way unobserved heterogeneity corresponding to a linear version of the model studied in Bonhomme et al. (2022). We show that inference is possible in this setting using a straightforward two-step estimation procedure inspired by existing discretization approaches. In the first step, we construct a discrete approximation of the unobserved heterogeneity by (k-means) clustering observations separately across the individual (i) and time (t) dimensions. In the second step, we estimate a linear model with two-way group fixed effects specific to each cluster. Our approach shares similarities with methods from the double machine learning literature, as the underlying moment conditions exhibit the same type of bias-reducing properties. We provide a theoretical analysis of a cross-fitted version of our estimator, establishing its asymptotic normality at parametric rate under the condition max(N, T ) = o(min(N, T ) 3 ). Simulation studies demonstrate that our methodology achieves excellent finite-sample performance, even when T is negligible with respect to N .

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

Le gouvernement français a mis en place en septembre 2018 un ensemble de mesures pour réduire les écarts de salaire entre femmes et hommes. Parmi ces mesures, toutes les entreprises privées de plus de 50 salariés sont tenues de calculer l’index d’égalité professionnelle. Elles doivent atteindre un seuil minimal à cet index, sous peine de sanctions. Nous étudions l’efficacité de cet index pour rendre compte des inégalités de rémunération entre les femmes et les hommes. Après avoir expliqué ses règles de calcul, nous analysons les résultats des entreprises en 2020 et les comparons avec les inégalités de rémunération femmes-hommes mesurées à l’aide d’autres indicateurs. Nous constatons que l’indicateur d’écart salarial tel que mesuré par l’index a tendance à minimiser les inégalités réelles, ce qui résulte de l’exclusion de certains salariés, de la possibilité pour les entreprises de déclarer l’index comme non calculable, et des choix méthodologiques adoptés.

We use quarterly panel data from the COME-HERE survey covering five European countries to analyse three facets of the experience of loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, in terms of prevalence, loneliness peaked in April 2020, followed by a U-shape pattern in the rest of 2020, and then remained relatively stable throughout 2021 and 2022. We then establish the individual determinants of loneliness and compare them to those found in the literature predating the COVID-19 pandemic. As in previous work, women are lonelier, and partnership, education, income, and employment protect against loneliness. However, the pandemic substantially shifted the age profile: it is now the youngest who are the loneliest. We last show that pandemic policies affected loneliness, which rose with containment policies but fell with government economic support. Conversely, the intensity of the pandemic itself, via the number of recent COVID-19 deaths, had only a minor impact. The experience of the pandemic has thus shown that public policy can influence societal loneliness trends.

BACKGROUND: Patients’ socioeconomic status on hospitals’ efficiency in controlling for clinical component characteristics may have a role that has few been studied in rehabilitation centers. DESIGN: Because of the national health insurance system, rehabilitation centers are free of charge. To answer whether a patient’s socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with efficiency and performance, we use a counterfactual analysis to get the patient’s SES effect “as if” the patient’s case was identical to whatever hospital. We restrained the data to patients from public acute care units where the decision on rehabilitation sector admission is based on availability, limiting bias by confounding factors. Besides, an analysis of six pathologies led to the same results. SETTING: An exhaustive, detailed administrative database on rehabilitation center stays in France. To define the patients’ socioeconomic status, we use two sources of data: the information collected at the time of the patient’s entry into rehabilitation care and the information collected during the patient’s stay in acute care. This double information avoids possible loss of socio-economic details between the two admissions. POPULATION: Patients recruited were exhaustively admitted over the year 2018 for stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure, or total hip replacement in France in the acute care unit and then in a rehab center. Mainly the elderly population. Information on patients’ demography, comorbidities, and SES are coded due to the reimbursement system. Different dimensions controlling for factors (hospital ownership, patient clinical characteristics, rehabilitation care specificities, medical staff detailed information, and patients’ socioeconomic status), were progressively added to control for any differences in baseline data between the two groups. METHODS: We assess rehabilitation centers’ efficiency by combining selected outcome quality indicators (Physical score improvement, Cognitive score improvement, Mortality, Return-to-home). The specific Providers’ Activity Index is used to get the performance index. CONCLUSIONS: The performance of healthcare institutions is correlated not only to the case mix of their patients but also to the socioeconomic status of the patients admitted. The performance needs to be seen in light of patients’ socioeconomic status.

Formal enforcement punishing defectors can sustain cooperation by changing incentives. In this paper we introduce a second effect of enforcement: it can also affect the capacity to learn about the group’s cooperativeness. Indeed, in contexts with strong enforcement, it is difficult to tell apart those who cooperate because of the threat of fines from those who are intrinsically cooperative types. Enforcement can then potentially have a negative dynamic impact on cooperation when it prevents learning. We provide theoretical and experimental evidence in support of this mechanism. Using a lab experiment with independent interactions and random rematching, we observe that, in early interactions, having faced an environment with fines in the past decreases current cooperation. We further show that this results from the interaction between enforcement and learning: the effect of having met cooperative partners has a stronger effect on current cooperation when this happened in an environment with no enforcement.

The evolution of labour market and disposable income inequalities over recent decades in high‐income countries has generated intense interest in academia and the wider public. The extent to which there have been common trends, or diverging experiences, across a broad range of different countries, remains relatively understudied. The papers in this two‐part special issue seek to provide the bases for consistent comparisons across 17 North American and European countries. In this Introduction we provide background for the cross‐country project, which has been conducted in parallel to the wider IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities. In addition, we provide brief summaries of key trends and findings in the four English‐speaking countries and four Nordic countries, as well as a companion paper on gender pay gaps across all 17 countries.

It is well-known that unemployment leaves scars after re-employment, but does this scarring effect persist even after retirement? We analyse European data on retirees from the SHARE panel, and show that the well-being of the retired continues to reflect the unemployment that they experienced over their working life. These scarring effects are somewhat smaller for older retirees, but larger for those who arguably had higher expectations regarding the labour market when they were active. The lower well-being from lifetime unemployment does not reflect lower retirement income. This long-run scarring for those who have left the labour market underlines that contemporaneous correlations significantly under-estimate the well-being cost of unemployment.

Background: Assessing frailty from middle age onward offers valuable insights into predicting healthcare expenditures throughout the life cycle. Objectives: This paper examines the use of physical frailty as an indicator of healthcare demand across all age groups. The originality of this work lies in extending the analysis of frailty indicators beyond the typical focus on individuals under 50 years old to include those in mid-life and older. Methods: For this study, we used a database where frailty was measured in 2012 in a sample of individuals aged 15 to over 90. These individuals were tracked for their healthcare expenditures from 2012 to 2016. Results: Among the sample of 6928 individuals, frailty in 2012 resulted in a statistically significant increase in costs at the 5% level for the population aged 15 to 65. We applied multilevel linear regression models with year fixed effects, controlling for demographic factors, education level, precarity, social dimensions, lifestyle factors (e.g., vegetable consumption), physical activity, emotional well-being, and medical history. A Hausman test was conducted to validate the model choice. For mortality rate analysis, Cox models were used. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that physical frailty provides valuable information for understanding its impact on healthcare expenditure. The effect of frailty on mortality is particularly significant for the elderly population. Moreover, frailty is a predictor of healthcare costs not only in older adults but also across the entire life cycle.

The distribution of job quality across workers and the change in job quality over time can be reflected in various measures of job outcomes, or single-item job-satisfaction scores. This paper takes both approaches to establish the evolution of job quality over a period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s in 13 OECD countries, using data from the three latest ISSP Work Orientation modules. The rise in job satisfaction from 1997 to 2005 has continued through 2015, despite the 2008 Great Recession. This improvement is also found in most of the joboutcome domains, despite some evidence of harder and more stressful work. Workers reported that job security was the most-important job aspect every year, and the percentage of workers with secure jobs rose over time. There has been a small rise in the dispersion of job satisfaction, but the good news regarding better job quality over a 20-year period does not seem to be dampened by large changes in its inequality.

Using rich historical surveys on job tasks and advanced machine learning techniques, we study which jobs can be moved from the office to home over three decades in France.

The share of jobs that can be done from home has increased steadily from 14% in 1991 to 45% in 2021. At the same time, actual Working From Home (WFH) remained limited to less than one fifth of its full potential before the Covid-19 crisis and is still below it in 2021.

The growth of WFH is largely unrelated to the evolution of job tasks, implying that the main obstacles to WFH have not been technical constraints. Low-skilled employees in particular have jobs that have long been largely teleworkable but they were barely teleworking before the Covid-19 crisis and remained still below 50% of their full potential during it. This pattern is not explained by differences in workers’ desire to telework. It implies that the well-known large inequality in access to WFH along the earnings distribution cannot be attributed only to feasibility constraints and is potentially inefficient.

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

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.

Under incomplete contracts, the mutual belief in reciprocity facilitates how traders create value through economic exchange. Creating such beliefs among strangers can be challenging even when they are allowed to communicate, because communication is cheap. In this paper, we first extend the literature showing that a truth-telling oath increases honesty to a sequential trust game with pre-play, fixed-form, and cheap-talk communication. Our results confirm that the oath creates more trust and cooperative behavior thanks to an improvement in communication; but we also show that the oath induces selection into communication -it makes people more wary of using communication, precisely because communication speaks louder under oath. We next designed additional treatments featuring mild and deterrent fines for deception to measure the monetary equivalent of the non-monetary incentives implemented by a truth-telling oath. We find that the oath is behaviorally equivalent to mild fines. The deterrent fine induces the highest level of cooperation. Altogether, these results confirm that allowing for interactions under oath within a trust game with communication creates significantly more economic value than the identical exchange institutions without the oath.

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

To counter the spread of COVID-19, the French government imposed several stringent social and political measures across its entire population. We hereto assess the impact of these political decisions on healthcare access in 2020, focusing on patients who suffered from an ischemic stroke. We divide our analysis into four distinct periods: the pre-COVID-19 pandemic period, the lockdown period, the “in-between” or transitional period, and the shutdown period. Our methodology involves utilizing a retrospective dataset spanning 2019–2020, an exhaustive French national hospital discharge diagnosis database for stroke inpatients, integrated with income information from the reference year of 2019. The results reveal that the most affluent were more likely to forgo medical care, particularly in heavily affected areas. Moreover, the most disadvantaged exhibited even greater reluctance to seek care, especially in the most severely impacted regions. The data suggest a loss of opportunity for less severely affected patients to benefit from healthcares during this lockdown period, regardless of demographic, location, and socioeconomic determinants. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a notable discrepancy in healthcare-seeking behavior, with less affluent patients and seniors (over 75 years old) experiencing slower rates of return to healthcare access compared to pre-pandemic levels. This highlights a persistent gap in healthcare accessibility, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, despite the easing of COVID-19 restrictions.

We estimate behavioral responses to dividend taxation using recent French reforms: a rate hike followed, five years later, by a cut. Exploiting household and firm tax data as well as data linking firms and shareholders, we find very large dividend tax elasticities to both reforms. Individuals who control firms adjust dividend receipts instantaneously, accounting for most of the aggregate dividend reaction. Investment is insensitive to dividend taxation. Dividend adjustments are instead driven by corporate saving, as owner-managers treat firms as low-tax saving vehicles. Our results fit the ‘new view’ of dividend taxation, provided an additional low-tax yet costly payout option is available that offers a tax arbitrage opportunity to entrepreneurs in control of their firms.

Du matin au soir, nous faisons toutes sortes de choix : conduire ou prendre le vélo, aller au supermarché ou à l’épicerie. Si ces décisions quotidiennes s’enchaînent souvent sans même qu’on en ait conscience, elles s’ajoutent à des décisions dont les enjeux sont autrement plus importants, qu’ils soient économiques, financiers, ou d’ordre environnemental, sociologique et culturel. Quels processus de décision se cachent derrière les réalités sociales qui déterminent le fonctionnement de l’économie ? Comment définir les coûts et les bénéfices entre lesquels nous devons arbitrer ? Pourquoi même l’absence de choix est-elle une forme de décision ? Comment les décisions individuelles se combinent-elles avec les décisions collectives ? Quelle est la palette d’outils permettant d’orienter les comportements ? L’économie comportementale apporte des réponses à ces questions en étudiant les décisions économiques à travers le prisme de facteurs rationnels, la comparaison des coûts et des bénéfices, mais aussi psychologiques, tels que les ressources cognitives, le contexte et le comportement des pairs.

Longtemps confinée à l’efficacité de la protection des droits de propriété nécessaires aux échanges de marché, l’analyse économique du droit trouve en grande partie ses origines dans la nécessité de pallier les défaillances de marché associées à la remise en cause des conditions qui rendent leur fonctionnement efficace. Cette branche de l’économie s’intéresse en particulier à la capacité de différentes règles juridiques à corriger les inefficacités structurelles qui en découlent, par exemple en matière de comportements de prévention des risques liés aux activités humaines ou encore de comportements délictuels. Les développements récents de l’économie comportementale apportent un éclairage nouveau sur la réponse des acteurs de l’économie aux règles qui leur sont appliquées, et conduisent en particulier à un renouvellement profond des recommandations de l’économie en matière d’élaboration des règles de droit. Cet article en présente un panorama, appliqué notamment aux régimes de responsabilité civile et aux modalités d’application de la politique pénale.

The choice between vocational and academic education at the end of secondary school has important long-run effects, and is made at an age where peers’ influence might be paramount. In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbors’ track choices on 9th graders choices at the end of lower secondary education, in Paris. This question is central to understand the extent to which residential segregation can reinforce social segregation across vocational and academic tracks. We rely on neighbors from the preceding cohort in order to bypass the reflection problem, and use within-catchment-area variation in distance between pairs of students to account for residential sorting. We use a pair-wise model that enables us to carefully study the role of distance between neighbors, and to perform detailed heterogeneity analysis. Our results suggest that close neighbors do influence track choices at the end of 9th grade, particularly for pupils pursuing a vocational track. This effect is driven by neighbors living in the same building, and is larger for pairs of boys and for pairs of pupils from low social background. Overall, our results suggest that neighbor effects tend to accentuate social segregation across high school tracks.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of hospital staffing resources on medical practice in public versus private hospitals. We used exhaustive delivery data from a French district of 11 hospitals over an 11-year period, from 2008 to 2018, including 168,120 observations. We performed multilevel logistic regression models with hospital fixed or random effects, while controlling for factors known to influence obstetric practice. We found that hospital staff ratios of obstetricians and that of midwives affected caesarean rates, but with different effects depending on the hospital sector. In public hospitals, the higher the ratio of obstetricians and that of midwives, the lower the probability of planned caesareans. In private hospitals, the higher the ratio of obstetricians, the greater the probability of planned caesareans. Indeed, in public hospitals, obstetricians and midwives, both salaried employees, do not have financial or organizational incentives to perform more caesareans. In private hospitals, obstetricians, who are independent doctors, may have such incentives. Our results underline the importance of having an adequate supply of health professionals in healthcare facilities to ensure appropriate care, with specific regard to the different characteristics of the public and private sectors.

Information on both wages and job quality is needed in order to understand the occupational dispersion of wellbeing. We analyse subjective wellbeing in a large UK sample to construct a measure of ‘overall reward’, the sum of wages and the value of job quality, in 90 different occupations. If only wages are included, then labour market inequality is underestimated: the dispersion of overall rewards is one‐third larger than the dispersion of wages. Our findings are similar, and stronger, in data on US workers. We find a positive correlation between job quality and wages in all specifications, both between individuals in the cross‐section and within individuals in panel data. The gender and ethnic gaps in the labour market are larger than those in wages alone, and the overall rewards to education on the labour market are underestimated by earnings differentials alone.

There is much still to learn about the relationship between income and well-being, and in particular how this may depend on the economic and social context. We use Russian data to estimate individual Welfare Functions of Income, and examine two potentially context-dependent concepts: self-assessed income needs and welfare sensitivity to income (how well-being changes with income). The considerable geographical diversity in Russia provides within-country variation in GDP, inequality, population density, and unemployment. We first show that income needs exceed actual income on average in Russia, and that these needs are less sensitive to changes in income than in other countries. Second, income needs vary by individual characteristics, while welfare sensitivity does not. Welfare sensitivity is however related to the regional context. Last, our estimated contextual results help us to understand why the existing literature has produced such a wide range of results.

We use Australian panel data to examine the impact of retirement on individual locus of control, a socio-emotional skill with substantial explanatory power for a broad range of life outcomes. Exploiting the eligibility age for the Australian Age Pension, we find that retirement leads to increased internal locus of control. This greater internal control explains around one-third and one-fifth of the positive effects of retirement on health and subjective well-being, respectively. We also show that locus of control is much more malleable at retirement than the other socio-emotional skills of the Big-Five personality traits, risk and time preferences, and trust.

Electronic monitoring (EM) has emerged as a popular tool for curbing the growth of large prison populations. Evidence on the causal effects of EM on criminal recidivism is, however, limited and it is unclear how this alternative to incarceration affects the labor supply of offenders and the outcomes of their family members. We study the countrywide expansion of EM in Sweden in 1997 wherein offenders sentenced to up to three months in prison were granted the option to substitute incarceration with EM. Our difference-in-differences estimates, which compare the change in the prison inflow rate of treated offenders to that of non-treated offenders with slightly longer sentences, show that the reform significantly decreased the number of incarcerations. Our main finding is that EM not only lowers criminal recidivism but also increases labor supply. Additionally, EM improves the educational attainment and early-life earnings of the children whose parents were exposed to the reform. The primary mechanisms through which EM operates appear to involve the preservation of offenders’ ties to the labor market, by reducing the barriers to both finding a job and changing employers. Our calculations suggest that the social benefits stemming from EM are about seven times larger than the fiscal savings associated with reduced prison expenditures, implying that the welfare gains from EM could be much greater than previously acknowledged.

We here evaluate the link between job insecurity and one of the most-important decisions that individuals take: homeownership. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax on firms that laid off older workers produced an unexpected exogenous rise in job insecurity for younger workers. A difference-in-differences analysis of panel data from the European Community Household Panel shows that this greater job insecurity significantly reduced the probability of becoming a homeowner. This drop seems more attributable to individual preferences rather than greater capital constraints, consistent with individuals reducing their exposure to long-term financial commitments in more-uncertain environments.

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

We study the earnings responses to six large payroll tax and income tax reforms in France. We find evidence of full pass-through to workers in cases where there is a strong and clear relationship between contributions and expected benefits. By contrast, we find a limited pass-through of employer payroll taxes to workers for reforms with no tax-benefit linkage, and close to full pass-through to workers for income tax reforms nominally incident on employees. Together with a meta-analysis of the literature, we interpret these results as evidence that tax-benefit linkage matters for incidence of payroll taxes, a claim long made by the literature but not backed by empirical evidence to date. Absent tax-benefit linkage, our results suggest that the individual-level incidence of payroll taxes aligns with their statutory incidence.

We explore the competition impact on patient management in healthcare (length of stay and technical procedure’s probability to be performed) by difference-indifference , exploiting time variations in the intensity of local competition caused by the French pro-competition reform (2004-2008). Models are estimated with hospital fixed effects to take into account hospital unobserved heterogeneity. We use an exhaustive dataset of in-hospital patients over 35 admitted for a heart attack. We consider the period before the reform from 2001 to 2003 and a period after the reform from 2009 to 2011. Before the reform, there were two types of reimbursement systems. Hospitals from private sector, were paid by fee-for-service. Hospitals from public sector were paid by global budget. They had no current activity’s link, and a weak competition incentive. After the DRG-based payment reform, all hospitals compete with each other to attract patients. We find the reform a sizeable positive competition effect on high-technical procedure for the private sector as well as a negative competition effect on the length of stay for public hospitals. However, the overall local competition effect of the reform explained a very marginal part of the explanatory power of the model. Actually, this period is characterised by two contradictory components: a competition effect of the reform and in-patients who are more concentrated. Results suggest that if competition impacted management patient’s change, it is through a global competition included in a global trend much more than a local competitive aspect of the reform.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are intended to reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of care. Nevertheless, usability issues common to EHRs have been identified. In this paper, we investigate these usability issues for social vulnerability codes. Using the acute care EHR and the rehabilitation care EHR databases, hospital stays of 800’000 patients are studied. This article highlights the differences in coding processes between public and private institutions observed when there are different incentives to code. Furthermore, it shows that the differences in coding are not random but depend on the coding strategy. This article emphasises that the reuse of data leads to biases in interpretation. Using the example of social vulnerability alerts policymakers to the need to consider these differences in coding processes when decisions are based on EHR information. Otherwise, this process of coding differences in social vulnerability may exacerbate social inequalities rather than reduce them.

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

While there is no gap in math performance at the beginning of Grade 1, a gap in favor of boys appears and widens during the first year of primary school. Using standardized national assessments administered during Grade 1 (CP) to more than 2.5 million pupils in France between 2018 and 2022, we show that this relative drop in girls’ performance is observed for all the cohorts and most of the exercises assessed. The greatest drop-off occurs among the best-performing girls at the start of Grade 1 (those in the top 1 % initially). These girls lose an average of nearly 7 percentile ranks at the start of second grade compared with boys in the same initial percentile. The emergence of a gender gap in math performance during Grade 1 is observed across all social categories and family compositions, and throughout the country. Girls lose slightly less ground compared to boys in classes where the top student in math is a girl, and in priority networks public schools (REP or REP+). However, characteristics of the school environment explain only a small part of the overall dynamics, suggesting that girls are losing ground compared to boys in every strata of society.

Electronic monitoring (EM) has emerged as a popular tool for curbing the growth of large prison populations. Evidence on the causal effects of EM on criminal recidivism is, however, limited and it is unclear how this alternative to incarceration affects the labor supply of offenders and the outcomes of their family members. We study the countrywide expansion of EM in Sweden in 1997 wherein offenders sentenced to up to three months in prison were granted the option to substitute incarceration with EM. Our difference-in-differences estimates, which compare the change in the prison inflow rate of treated offenders to that of non-treated offenders with slightly longer sentences, show that the reform significantly decreased the number of incarcerations. Our main finding is that EM not only lowers criminal recidivism but also increases labor supply. Additionally, EM improves the educational attainment and early-life earnings of the children whose parents were exposed to the reform. The primary mechanisms through which EM operates appear to involve the preservation of offenders’ ties to the labor market, by reducing the barriers to both finding a job and changing employers. Our calculations suggest that the social benefits stemming from EM are about seven times larger than the fiscal savings associated with reduced prison expenditures, implying that the welfare gains from EM could be much greater than previously acknowledged.

We study how students adjust their early career choices in response to economic crises, and how this behavioral response affects their long-run labor market outcomes. We specifically examine the context of the severe recession that struck Sweden in the early 1990s, which disproportionally affected the manufacturing and construction sectors. We find that students who experienced paternal job loss in these heavily affected sectors were more likely to choose high school programs linked to sectors less impacted by the recession. As a result, these individuals achieved better labor market outcomes in adulthood, including higher employment rates and career earnings. Our findings are consistent with informational frictions being a key obstacle to structural change, and we identify career choice as an important mechanism through which recessions reshape labor markets in the very long run.

There is much still to learn about the relationship between income and well-being, and in particular how this may depend on the economic and social context. We use Russian data to estimate individual Welfare Functions of Income, and examine two potentially context-dependent concepts: self-assessed income needs and welfare sensitivity to income (how well-being changes with income). The considerable geographical diversity in Russia provides within-country variation in GDP, inequality, population density, and unemployment. We first show that income needs exceed actual income on average in Russia, and that these needs are less sensitive to changes in income than in other countries. Second, income needs vary by individual characteristics, while welfare sensitivity does not. Welfare sensitivity is however related to the regional context. Last, our estimated contextual results help us to understand why the existing literature has produced such a wide range of results

L’homogamie économique est un phénomène largement documenté, qui est souvent interprété comme résultant d’une préférence pour l’entre-soi. Pourtant, les caractéristiques des conjoints dans un ménage conditionnent non seulement leur satisfaction à être ensemble mais également leurs décisions de division du travail. Nous présentons dans cet article une approche qui englobe à la fois le processus de formation des couples, le partage des ressources au sein du ménage, et la complémentarité des conjoints dans les activités du couple. Appliquée à l’Allemagne entre 2013 et 2019, cette approche montre que l’homogamie salariale est concentrée dans le haut de la distribution, que l’éducation a un poids très important dans les complémentarités des conjoints, et que le salaire et l’éducation jouent un rôle similaire dans les modalités de partage du revenu du ménage.

Cet ouvrage relatif à l’économie de la santé et des systèmes de santé aborde les concepts clé de l’économie et leur application au champ de l’économie de la santé. Les concepts économiques sont expliqués et documentésà l’aide de nombreux exemples et exercices corrigés en économie de la santé. L’objectif est de comprendre les politiques publiques en santé. Ce manuel étudie ainsi : les principes de l’intervention de l’État (la demande et les besoins de santé…) ;la notion de bien et son caractère public et privé (spécificités des biens en économie, notion de bien privé et bien public…) ;la construction du système de santé, ses objectifs, son évolution future au regard des nouvelles technologies (comprendre les contraintes de l’offre, les tensions, l’offre de bien sur le marché, les choix de production des produits de santé, le traitement des données, etc.) ;les différents modes de tarification et la place de la concurrence ;la notion de qualité (qualité en soins, etc.) ;une analyse d’autres système de santé (Chine, Etats-Unis…).

It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual’s starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility relative to their parents. In 18 waves of UK panel data, both own and parental social status are independently positively associated with Rightleaning voting and political preferences: given their own social status, the upwardly-mobile are therefore more Left-wing.We investigate a number of potential mediators: these results do not reflect the relationship between well-being and own and parents’ social status, but are partly linked to the individual’s beliefs about how fair society is. We replicate these findings using US data and show that, in both countries, the choice of specification when controlling for the respondent’s own status is crucial and may help explain some of the mixed findings in the literature.

This short paper presents an overview of the French policy mix towards labour market inequalities, consisting of a high minimum wage together with targeted payroll tax cuts around the minimum wage. It reviews the recent literature documenting the impact of that policy mix on employment and wage inequality. The main takeaways are that pre‐tax wage inequality has been increasing in France rather like it has in the UK and the US, while net wage inequality has decreased and then remained stable. The employment experience for the middle age group is also very close in France to the one in the UK and the US, while it differs markedly at young and older ages. The paper offers two more general thoughts on how to make progress in comparing policy options. First, most studies tend to give too much weight to tax and benefit reforms in being able to reduce inequality as they disregard incidence mechanisms, and fail to incorporate properly longer‐term effects of other policies on pre‐tax inequality. Second, the design of effective policy should always incorporate simplicity and salience. Failure to do so is likely to lead to little expected impact of such policies.

We construct series of posttax income for France over the 1900–2018 period and compare them with US series. We quantify the extent of redistribution—the reduction from pretax to posttax inequality—and estimate the contribution of redistribution in explaining differences in posttax inequality. We find that differences in pretax inequality drive most of the differences in posttax inequality between France and the United States, and that changes over time in both countries are mostly due to changes in pretax inequality. We highlight that the concept of redistribution can be empirically misleading for judging how policies reduce inequalities.

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

This research paper examines changes in patient care management in acute care hospitals between 2001 and 2011. During this time, there were two opposing factors at play: the competition effect of the reform and the policymaker’s decision to reduce public hospitals across France. By studying the trends, it is evident that there has been a significant overall shift in patient care management during this period. This change could be attributed to the global competition effect and the concentration of in-patients in specific public facilities. Through the difference-in-difference method, the study analyzed time variations in the intensity of local competition. It was found that local competition had a negligible impact on patient care management. Additionally, the study revealed that there was a significant positive competition effect on high-technical procedures for the private sector, which is in line with the market segment where private sector hospitals have a leadership position and the pro-competitive reform intensified this position. The study also uncovered a negative competition effect on the length of stay for public hospitals. Prior to the implementation of the DRG-based payment reform, public sector hospitals were paid a global budget. However, after the reform was implemented, they had to shorten the length of stay to increase the number of stays. For-profit hospitals have always been paid based on the number of stays. The results are robust and consistent when alternative measures of local competition are used.

Dans cette conférence inédite, Thomas Piketty présente une synthèse de ses recherches historiques et comparatives sur les inégalités. Abordant des thèmes aussi variés que l’éducation, l’héritage, la crise climatique, la taxation des richesses ou les inégalités de genre, il bat en brèche l’idée qu’il pourrait exister des inégalités naturelles et montre que la marche vers l’égalité se construit toujours par des luttes politique et sociales.

Today’s tax systems, in which value‐added taxes and payroll taxes play a prominent role, are largely creations of the 1950s. We need to invent modern tax systems adapted to the reality of the 21 st century: the growing importance of capital and the rise of inequality. This article reviews some of the challenges involved with increasing the progressivity of tax systems in a globalised world and discusses how these challenges could be overcome. I make the case for new and more ambitious forms of international cooperation and for modern forms of wealth taxation.

There is a common feeling that life has become more insecure over time. I here consider this proposition with respect to the labor market. I first discuss how labor-market insecurity might be measured, and then its potential consequences for individuals. To answer the question of “What Happened,” I then review a number of pieces of evidence regarding developments in the labor market, and perhaps surprisingly find no consistent support for the proposition that the labor market has become significantly more insecure.

Le présent article vise à effectuer des projections de la population dépendante âgée de 60 ans ou plus et à identifier les facteurs qui influencent ces projections. À ces fins, nous développons une nouvelle approche méthodologique permettant d’identifier le rôle de différents paramètres (par exemple, le changement de la probabilité de rester autonome, le changement de la répartition des gains de survie entre différents niveaux de dépendance) dans la prévision de la morbidité. Cet article se concentre sur l’aspect méthodologique de cette nouvelle méthode. Il fournit également, à titre d’illustration, une projection de la population de personnes âgées en situation de dépendance ou de handicap en France en 2060, à partir des données de l’enquête française CARE‑M et de l’enquête européenne SHARE. Il montre notamment que conserver un ratio entre l’espérance de vie sans incapacité et l’espérance de vie totale similaire à celui observé dans le passé nécessite de formuler des hypothèses optimistes quant à l’évolution de la probabilité de rester autonome.

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.

The Swedish banking crisis in the early 90s counts as one of the five most severe financial crises in history. We examine how firms more exposed to this event adjusted employment in the longrun and the mechanisms involved. Our analysis draws on matched employer-employee data containing the financial statements for a large sample of firms. Our difference-indifferences estimates show that firms with a greater pre-crisis debt burden experienced more difficulties in accessing external capital during the crisis compared to firms with lower baseline debts. This is consistent with the most exposed firms becoming financially constrained. More exposed firms exhibit stronger downward employment adjustments than less exposed firms, and the reductions are mainly concentrated among low-skilled workers. Employment in more exposed firms started to recover four years after the crisis and had fully recuperated about a decade later. These firms also temporarily saw a larger drop in both productivity and investment. We do not find a significant effect on the wage bill, and the estimates are precise enough to rule out even moderate effect sizes.

We study the relative impact of custodial and non-custodial sentences on later crime and labor-market outcomes in Denmark, a country where detention conditions are particularly good. To do so, we take advantage of a large-scale reform of the Danish legislation implemented in 2000, whereby incarceration was replaced by a non-custodial sentence for most drunk-driving crimes, which represented a quarter of the custodial sentences inflicted prior to the reform. Our first key finding is that stakeholders anticipated the consequences of the reform: around the time of the reform, the number of cases tried dropped and the nature of the cases changed significantly. To measure the relative impact of incarceration, we therefore resort to a novel instrumental variable approach exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in the probability of being tried after the reform, and therefore incarcerated, based on the crime date. We find that incarcerated offenders commit more crimes and have weaker ties to the labor market after release. The pattern of results suggests that part of the explanation for this increase in offenders’ criminal activities can be found in their greater precariousness.

We here address the causal relationship between the maternal genetic risk for depression and child human capital using UK birth-cohort data. We find that an increase of one standard deviation (SD) in the maternal polygenic risk score for depression reduces their children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skill scores by 5 to 7% of a SD throughout adolescence. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests addressing, among others, concerns about pleiotropy and dynastic effects. Our Gelbach decomposition analysis suggests that the strongest mediator is genetic nurture (through maternal depression itself), with genetic inheritance playing only a marginal role.

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.

This paper provides one of the first tests of adaptation to the complete set of residential transitions. We use long-run SOEP panel data and consider the impact of all housing transitions, whether or not they involve a change in housing tenure or geographical movement, on both life satisfaction and housing satisfaction. Controlling for individual characteristics, some residential transitions affect life satisfaction only little, while all transitions have a significant effect on housing satisfaction. This latter is particularly large for renters who become homeowners and move geographically, and for renters who move without changing tenure status. Regarding housing satisfaction, we only uncover evidence of some adaptation for renter-renter moves. Losing homeowner status is the only transition that produces lower housing satisfaction, and here the effect seems to become even more negative over time.

Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it, and we here consider marriage as one potential source of this insurance. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by larger private firms when they laid off workers aged 50 or over, led to an exogenous rise in job insecurity for the uncovered (younger workers) in these larger firms. A difference-in-differences analysis using French panel data reveals that this greater job insecurity for the under-50s led to a significant rise in their probability of marriage, and especially when the partner had greater job security, consistent with marriage providing insurance against labour-market risk.

Payroll taxes are usually designed to fund social insurance and not to contribute directly to redistribution. Over the last fifty years, France has modified dramatically the schedule of payroll taxation, turning it into the most progressive part of its tax system. Using administrative data and detailed microsimulation model of labor income taxation, we show that pretax wage (or labor cost) inequality measured by the P90/P10 ratio has increased by 15.4%, while net wage inequality has actually decreased by 18.9% over the 1967–2019 period. This reduction in wage inequality can be largely attributed to the policy mix of reductions of employer payroll taxes for low wage earners joined with minimum wage increases. We discuss whether this unusual French experiment carries lessons for other countries.

Purpose The authors track the well-being of individuals across five European countries during the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and relate their well-being to working from home. The authors also consider the role of pandemic-policy stringency in affecting well-being in Europe. Design/methodology/approach The authors have four waves of novel harmonised longitudinal data in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden, covering the period May–November 2020. Well-being is measured in five dimensions: life satisfaction, a worthwhile life, loneliness, depression and anxiety. A retrospective diary indicates whether the individual was working in each month since February 2020 and if so whether at home or not at home. Policy stringency is matched in per country at the daily level. The authors consider both cross-section and panel regressions and the mediating and moderating effects of control variables, including household variables and income. Findings Well-being among workers is lower for those who work from home, and those who are not working have the lowest well-being of all. The panel results are more mitigated, with switching into working at home yielding a small drop in anxiety. The panel and cross-section difference could reflect adaptation or the selection of certain types of individuals into working at home. Policy stringency is always negatively correlated with well-being. The authors find no mediation effects. The well-being penalty from working at home is larger for the older, the better-educated, those with young children and those with more crowded housing. Originality/value The harmonised cross-country panel data on individuals’ experiences during COVID-19 are novel. The authors relate working from home and policy stringency to multiple well-being measures. The authors emphasise the effect of working from home on not only the level of well-being but also its distribution.

We show in a large-scale field experiment that a brief exposure to female role models working in scientific fields affects high school students’ perceptions and choice of undergraduate major. The classroom interventions reduced the prevalence of stereotypical views on jobs in science and gender differences in abilities. They also made high-achieving girls in Grade 12 more likely to enrol in selective and male-dominated STEM programs in college. Comparing treatment effects across the 56 role model participants, we find that the most effective interventions are those that improved students’ perceptions of STEM careers without overemphasizing women’s under-representation in science.

Overall, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a large proportion of uterine fibroids were not managed in the hospital setting. The lockdown period was associated with large reductions in hospital service utilisation, particularly for non-emergency patients. As we observed no shortterm post-lockdown catch-up, two questions arise: What became of these untreated patients? How has their future health been affected? Two hypotheses appear likely. The first is that the woman continued receiving outpatient care, but the therapeutic procedures took place only in hospitals and there were fewer of them. While medical treatment could theoretically have been used, the only available treatment was removed from the market in March 2020 due to the risk of serious drug-induced hepatitis. The second is that of non-recourse to care, or its deferral for more than a year, or even therapeutic abstention because no kind of treatment was available. This strongly suggests a loss of opportunity for these women, with its accompanying risks of hysterectomy, of transfusions, and of impaired quality of life.

We use annual data on over 150 countries between 2005 and 2018 to look at the relationship between subjective well-being (both cognitive and affective) and the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI appears to be more closely related to cognitive than affective well-being. We also consider the relationships between the three HDI components (the Income, Health, and Education Indices) and well-being, and find that, on average, the Income Index has the strongest predictive power. Importantly, we find that the three HDI components only matter equally in Western and rich countries. Our analysis contributes to the discussion about cultural sensitivity in paradigms of societal development in two ways. We first show that differences in preferences toward development aims exist. Second, we propose a weighting procedure for a culturally-sensitive version of the HDI.

All over the world, measures were taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Social distancing not only had a strong influence on mental health, but also on the organization of care systems. It changed existing practices, as we had to rapidly move from face-to-face contact to remote contact with patients. These changes have prompted research into the attitudes of mental healthcare professionals towards telepsychology. Several factors affect these attitudes: at the institutional and organizational level, but also the collective and personal experience of practitioners. This paper is based on an original European survey conducted by the EFPA (European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations) Project Group on eHealth in 2020, which allowed to observe the variability in perceptions of telepsychology between countries and mental healthcare professionals. This study highlights different variables that contributed to the development of attitudes, such as motivations, acquired experience, or training. We found the “feeling of telepresence”—which consists of forgetting to some extent that we are at a distance, in feeling together—and social telepresence in particular as main determinants of the perception and the practice of telepsychology.

Enjeux : En septembre 2018, le gouvernement français a pris un ensemble de mesures visant à réduire les inégalités femmes-hommes, parmi lesquelles la mise en place de l’Index de l’égalité professionnelle. Depuis 2019, toutes les entreprises privées de plus de 50 salariés doivent calculer cet indicateur et obtenir une valeur minimale à cet Index, à défaut de quoi elles s’exposent à des sanctions. Cet Index introduit, pour la première fois dans les politiques de lutte contres les inégalités liées au sexe, une obligation de résultat pour les entreprises et non seulement une obligation de moyens. Présentation : Cette étude a évalué l’impact de la mise en place de l’Index de l’égalité professionnelle sur les inégalités entre femmes et hommes dans l’entreprise. Pour ce faire, elle s’appuie sur les données déclarées par les entreprises et les données administratives détaillées concernant les rémunérations et heures travaillées par l’ensemble des salariés du secteur privé. Enseignements clés : 1. La couverture de l’Index est très imparfaite Seulement 50 % des entreprises (44 % des PME-PMI et 93 % des entreprises de plus de 1 000 salariés) normalement assujetties déclarent une note sur 100 points. Seul un quart des salariés du secteur privé sont concernés par le calcul de l’indicateur d’écart salarial de l’Index. 2. La mise en place de l’Index n’a pas d’effet détectable sur les inégalités femmes-hommes dans les entreprises concernées Les entreprises de moins de 50 salariés (non assujetties à l’Index) et celles de plus de 50 salariés (assujetties à l’Index) ont des trajectoires remarquablement parallèles en termes d’inégalités femmes-hommes entre 2010 et 2020. On n’observe pas de changement de tendance pour les entreprises assujetties après la mise en place de l’Index en 2018. 3. L’Index tend à invisibiliser les inégalités réelles entre femmes et hommes Les bons résultats obtenus par les entreprises pour les écarts de rémunération sont liés à deux choix méthodologiques discutables faits pour le calcul de l’indicateur d’écart de salaire de l’Index : l’application d’un seuil de tolérance (tous les écarts inférieurs à 5 % sont ramenés à 0) l’utilisation des hommes comme catégorie de référence pour normaliser les écarts (les écarts dans chaque groupe sont divisés par le salaire moyen des hommes, ce qui les réduit quand les femmes sont moins bien payées que les hommes mais les augmentent dans le cas inverse). 4. Les entreprises qui déclarent leur Index ne sont pas plus vertueuses – au sens de leur performance en matière d’égalité professionnelle – que celles qui ne déclarent pas Les données administratives utilisées dans l’étude permettent de mesurer les inégalités femmes-hommes à la fois pour les entreprises qui déclarent un Index et celles qui ne le déclarent pas : les entreprises qui ne déclarent pas leur Index ou déclarent ne pas pouvoir le calculer ne sont pas plus inégalitaires que les autres. Elles reportent en revanche des notes à l’indicateur d’écart salarial supérieures à celles recalculées à partir des données administratives. On observe que pour l’indicateur simple et transparent que constitue la part des femmes parmi les dix plus hautes rémunérations, les déclarations des entreprises concordent avec leurs résultats reconstruits alors que cela n’est plus vrai pour l’indicateur complexe et ajustable d’écart salarial. Cela suggère que l’utilisation d’indicateurs complexes et peu transparents peut permettre aux entreprises d’invisibiliser leurs inégalités réelles.

We show in a large-scale field experiment that a brief exposure to female role models working in scientific fields affects high school students’ perceptions and choices of undergraduate major. The classroom interventions reduced the prevalence of stereotypical views on jobs in science and gender differences in abilities. They also made high-achieving girls in grade 12 more likely to enrol in selective and male-dominated science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs in college. Comparing treatment effects across the 56 role model participants, we find that the most effective interventions are those that improved students’ perceptions of science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers without overemphasising women’s under-representation in science.

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

Even though females currently outnumber males in higher education, they remain largely underrepresented in math-related fields of study, with no sign of improvement during the past decades. To better understand which students drive this underrepresentation, we use PISA 2012 data on 251,120 15-year-old students in 61 countries to analyse boys’ and girls’ educational intentions along the ability distribution on math assessment tests. We analyze the percentages of boys and girls intending to pursue math-related studies or careers as a function of math performance. First, we show that for both boys and girls, there is a positive and linear relation between the probability of intending to pursue math and math performance. Second, the positive relation is stronger among boys than among girls. In particular, the gender gap in student intentions to pursue math-related studies or careers is close to zero among the poorest performers in math and increases steadily with math performance. Third, as a consequence, the gender gap in math performance, to the detriment of girls, is larger among students intending to pursue math than in the general student population.

We here show that individual-level economic insecurity, based on the time profle of economic resources, is detrimental to both physical and mental health in long-run Australian panel data. This relationship is found in panel data, comparing an individual’s change in economic security over time to the changes in her health. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that economic insecurity is par-ticularly detrimental to the health of the most-deprived, those over the age of 30, and men rather than women.

Boissel and Matray (2022) find that investment increased after 2013 in French firms facing higher dividend taxes. We identify an alteration in the code plotting the event study of the effect of this reform on investment. Using identical data and removing this alteration, we find differential pre-trends between treated and control firms. We also establish that the controls referred to as “size growth,” used in all the difference-in-difference specifications, effectively are controls for lagged investment, i.e., the main outcome variable. Removing such controls attenuates differential pre-trends but leaves no clear event study evidence of a positive effect of dividend taxation on investment.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, French healthcare practitioners seldom used teleconsultations in France. COVID-19 has brought with it a great need for the use of teleconsultation and other interventions using digital technology. The study’s objective was to identify how French healthcare practitioners used teleconsultation for obstetrics and gynecology care services before and during COVID-19. Our study used a survey of French healthcare practitioners specializing in obstetrics and gynecology from 1 March 2020, to 31 April 2020. We first described the global picture of the teleconsultation context prior to COVID-19 and then during the first lockdown measures. For both contexts, we set up three aspects: 1- teleconsultation regarding providers’ ability; 2- teleconsultation with regards to its technological features; and 3- teleconsultation for which type of healthcare. Second, we mobilized logit models to study the determinant factors of teleconsultation use as well as what drives provider satisfaction with teleconsultation practice. We show the central role of training, and the importance of some main digital technology benefits, namely improving public health, responding to patients’ requests, and facilitating healthcare access. We also exhibit the importance of the limitations specifically related to the lack of convenience in digital technology use and the lack of trust in the digital service provided. Our results guide policy makers on suppliers’ motivation and needs for teleconsultation adoption. These results highlight the conditions for efficient use of teleconsultation.

We here investigate the role of risk aversion in COVID‐19 vaccine hesitancy. The theoretical effect is ambiguous, as both COVID‐19 infection and vaccination side‐effects involve probabilistic elements. In large‐scale data covering five European countries, we find that vaccine hesitancy falls with risk aversion, so that COVID‐19 infection is perceived as involving greater risk than is vaccination.

We use a nationally-representative dataset that includes a large sample of sexual-orientation minorities to investigate gender bias and sexual-orientation discrimination in career progression. Our results are consistent with persistent gender bias findings and non-heterosexual identity-based employment discrimination. Our findings are consistent with previous work noting that protective legislation for gay and lesbian sexual identities have increased the cost of discrimination and contribute to the improved socioeconomic status of a substantial number of people in these minority groups. However, these gains have not been shared with other minority groups in the LGB+ community, which still have some of the lowest probabilities of holding managerial jobs, and higher probabilities of appearing in lower socioeconomic classes.

Qui vote pour qui et pourquoi ? Comment la structure sociale des électorats des différents courants politiques en France a-t-elle évolué de 1789 à 2022 ? En s’appuyant sur un travail inédit de numérisation des données électorales et socio-économiques des 36 000 communes de France couvrant plus de deux siècles, cet ouvrage propose une histoire du vote et des inégalités à partir du laboratoire français. Au-delà de son intérêt historique, ce livre apporte un regard neuf sur les crises du présent et leur possible dénouement. La tripartition de la vie politique issue des élections de 2022, avec d’une part un bloc central regroupant un électorat socialement beaucoup plus favorisé que la moyenne – et réunissant d’après les sources ici rassemblées le vote le plus bourgeois de toute l’histoire de France –, et de l’autre des classes populaires urbaines et rurales divisées entre les deux autres blocs, ne peut être correctement analysée qu’en prenant le recul historique nécessaire. En particulier, ce n’est qu’en remontant à la fin du 19e siècle et au début du 20e siècle, à une époque où l’on observait des formes similaires de tripartition avant que la bipolarisation ne l’emporte pendant la majeure partie du siècle dernier, que l’on peut comprendre les tensions à l’œuvre aujourd’hui. La tripartition a toujours été instable alors que c’est la bipartition qui a permis le progrès économique et social. Comparer de façon minutieuse les différentes configurations permet de mieux envisager plusieurs trajectoires d’évolutions possibles pour les décennies à venir. Une entreprise d’une ambition unique qui ouvre des perspectives nouvelles pour sortir de la crise actuelle. Toutes les données collectées au niveau des 36 000 communes de France sont disponibles en ligne en accès libre sur le site une histoire du conflit politique.fr, qui comprend des centaines de cartes, graphiques et tableaux interactifs auxquels le lecteur pourra se reporter afin d’approfondir ses propres analyses et hypothèses.

Présentation Depuis la création de l’impôt sur les grandes fortunes (IGF) en 1982, l’imposition du patrimoine a toujours été assortie d’un mécanisme de plafonnement. Celui-ci visait à limiter le montant d’impôt payé lorsque la somme des impositions sur le revenu et le patrimoine dont les ménages étaient redevables dépassait une certaine part de leur revenu. Ce rapport vise à mieux comprendre qui étaient les ménages plafonnés, quels étaient leur niveau et leur composition de patrimoine et de revenus. Il propose une description approfondie de ces ménages, et étudie leurs réactions à deux réformes du plafonnement : son annulation ponctuelle en 2012, et la forte variation de son application avec la transformation de l’ISF en IFI.

L’objectif affiché des réformes de la fiscalité du capital mises en place entre 2017 et 2018 était de baisser la fiscalité sur le capital afin de soutenir l’investissement privé, et in fine la croissance de l’économie française. L’enjeu d’évaluation est donc de pouvoir quantifier ces potentiels effets sur l’investissement, et plus généralement sur la circulation du capital dans l’économie. Les précédents travaux de recherche menés jusqu’à présent n’ont pas mis en évidence d’effets sur l’investissement de la mise en place du PFU pour les entreprises déjà existantes (Bach et al., 2021a), et le constat s’est avéré similaire pour la transformation de l’ISF en IFI (Bach et al., 2021b). La marge intensive de l’investissement ne semble donc pas être une marge de réponse comportementale majeure aux modifications de la fiscalité sur la distribution des revenus ou sur le stock de capital. Les travaux de recherche sur données françaises ont, par contre, mis en évidence une forte réaction de la distribution des revenus du capital à ces réformes, avec notamment une très forte hausse de la distribution des dividendes à la mise en place du PFU (Bach et al., 2019, 2021a), mais aussi à la mise en place de l’IFI avec la suppression du mécanisme du plafonnement (Bach et al., 2023). L’objectif de l’étude présentée dans ce rapport est de compléter ces travaux en mesurant l’impact des réformes du PFU et de l’IFI sur des décisions d’investissement à la marge extensive, c’est-à-dire correspondant à des choix discrets d’investissement comme la création d’entreprise, l’expatriation ou au retour d’entrepreneurs, et les décisions de réinvestissement de capital.

Over the last 10 years, governments have launched major initiatives to reduce international tax evasion. Yet despite the importance of these developments, little is known about the effects of these new policies. Is global tax evasion falling or rising? Are new issues emerging, and if so, what are they? This report addresses these questions thanks to an unprecedented international research collaboration building on the work of more than 100 researchers globally.

La tarification à l’activité – T2A – est un nom générique qui couvre une multitude de paiements. Par ailleurs, la T2A s’est transformée d’un instrument à un objectif de tarification à trois missions – de tarification, de régulation, et de santé publique –. Il conviendrait plutôt de parler des T2A que de la T2A. De plus, ces différentes missions s’opposent et entraînent des contradictions dans les incitations envoyées par la tutelle aux établissements hospitaliers. Évoquer le retour à un budget global comme solution miracle serait une erreur car cela reviendrait à entériner les effets néfastes des T2A actuelles.

This paper reviews recent developments in the theory and practice of optimal capital taxation. We emphasize three main rationales for capital taxation. First, the frontier between capital and labour income flows is often fuzzy, thereby lending support to a broad-based, comprehensive income tax. Next, the very notions of income and consumption flows are difficult to define and measure for top wealth holders where capital gains due to asset price effects dwarf ordinary income and consumption flows. Therefore the proper way to tax billionaires is a progressive wealth tax. Finally, as individuals cannot choose their parents, there are strong meritocratic reasons why we should tax inherited wealth more than earned income or self-made wealth for which individuals can be held responsible, at least in part. This implies that the ideal fiscal system should also include a progressive inheritance tax, in addition to progressive income and wealth taxes. We then confront our prescriptions with historical experience. Although there are significant differences, we argue that observed fiscal systems in modern democracies bear important similarities with this ideal triptych.

Conditions de travail, qualité des emplois, choix managériaux et d’organisation, santé et sens du travail : un état de la situation française.

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

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

Vishkin (2022) shows that female participation in chess is lower in more gender equal countries (the “gender-equality paradox”) but that this relation is driven by the mean age of the players in a country, which makes it more of an epiphenomenon than a real paradox. Relying on the same data on competitive chess players ( N = 768,480 from 91 countries) as well as on data on 15-year-old students ( N = 312,571 from 64 countries), we show that the gender-equality paradox for chess holds among young players. The paradox also remains on the whole population of chess players when controlling for the age of the players at the individual rather than at the country level or when controlling for age differences across countries. Therefore, there is a gender-equality paradox in chess that is not entirely driven by a generational shift mechanism as argued by Vishkin (2022), and previous explanations for the paradox cannot be dismissed.

Many governments have sought to enhance patient choice in hospital by intensifying competitive pressure on hospital administrations that is expected to improve efficiency, quality, and innovation. However, there is mixed evidence on whether patients travel past their local hospitals to seek better quality care and whether higher-income patients are those most sensitive to respond to competitive pressures. Using detailed data from 17 million inpatient stays admitted in France during 2019, this paper explores patients’ choice of provider where forprofit, non-profit, research hospital and local hospitals are allowed to compete with each other. We estimate the extent to which deprivation gradient plays on patient’s choice of provider. We found that, in general, patients travel for their care, with just one-quarter of them going to the nearest hospital. In fact, the most vulnerable patients (i.e., those socioeconomically deprived, and very aged) are mostly treated in local public hospitals with the lowest quality service level, and with large variability in quality as well, while those with less socioeconomic deprivation seek care at higher-quality for-profit hospitals. Our counterfactual simulations show that admission to university hospitals attenuates existing inequalities. However, whether it delays the healthcare access sought by this population remains an open question.

We use nationally representative panel data from Australia to consider the impact of retirement on individual locus of control, a socio-emotional skill that has substantial explanatory power for a broad range of life outcomes. We establish causality via cohort-specific eligibility age for the Australian Age Pension. We show that retirement leads to increased internal locus of control. This greater sense of internal control can explain around one-third and one-fifth of the positive effects of retirement on health and subjective well-being, respectively. The impact of retirement on control beliefs varies along the distribution of locus of control, with the positive influence being most pronounced for men with a relatively high sense of internal control and for women with a relatively high sense of external control. Last, we provide evidence that locus of control is much more malleable at retirement than the other socio-emotional skills of the Big-Five personality traits, risk and time preferences, and trust.

Public Goods aim to improve individual welfare. We investigate the causal consequences of roads on well-being in 24 African countries, instrumenting paved roads by 19th Century hypothetical lines between major ports and cities. We have data on over 32000 individuals, and consider both their objective and subjective well-being, via access to four basic needs and the subjective evaluation of living conditions respectively. Our instrumental-variable analysis suggests that roads reduce material deprivation, by improving access to basic needs, but that there is no causal relation between the distance to a road and subjective living conditions. The benefit of roads in providing basic needs then seems to be offset by worse outcomes in other domains.

La suppression de la taxe d’habitation sur la résidence principale a été mise en place de façon progressive dès 2018. Cette taxe représentait 23,4 milliards de recettes en 2016 pour les collectivités locales, dont 18,7 payés par les ménages contribuables. La première partie du rapport s’intéresse aux réactions des communes, privées d’une importante source de contrôle de leurs recettes fiscales à terme et au mécanisme de compensation mis en place par l’Etat. La deuxième partie de ce rapport s’intéresse aux effets de la réforme sur les loyers et prix de l’immobilier. La question de l’incidence – c’est-à-dire qui bénéficie de cette baisse d’impôt – est un enjeu majeur de toute réforme fiscale. Il s’agit de savoir si le bénéfice de cette baisse de la fiscalité a pu être capté par les propriétaires de biens immobiliers, à travers les prix de vente de leurs biens, ou à travers les loyers qu’ils perçoivent de leurs locataires. La troisième partie de ce rapport s’intéresse, à l’échelle individuelle, aux comportements de mobilité résidentielle pour savoir si la suppression de la taxe d’habitation, en rendant certaines communes plus attractives, a eu pour conséquence des mobilités accrues.

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this insecurity reduced their fertility by 3.7 percentage points (with a 95% confidence interval between 0.7 and 6.6 percentage points). Reduced fertility is only found at the intensive margin: job insecurity reduces family size but not the probability of parenthood itself. Our results also suggest negative selection into parenthood, as this fertility effect does not appear for low-income and less-educated workers.

This paper examines the empirical relationship between individuals’ cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and COVID-19 compliance behaviors using cross-country data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We find that both cognitive and non-cognitive skills predict responsible health behaviors during the COVID-19 crisis. Episodic memory is the most important cognitive skill, while conscientiousness and neuroticism are the most significant personality traits. There is also some evidence of a role for an internal locus of control in compliance.

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn’t accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health inequalities between the rich and poor. This study examines the role of housing in income-related health inequalities (income-health gradient) in urban China. We here analyze 1991–2015 China Health and Nutrition Survey data to ask how housing affects income-related health inequalities in urban China. We find pro-poor inequalities in self-reported bad health but pro-rich inequalities in objective bad health (general overweight/obesity, central obesity and high blood pressure). Housing conditions serve to reduce the health gradient, especially for objective health. On the contrary, homeownership exacerbates the health gradient. Improving housing conditions thus appears to be an effective way of reducing the income-health gradient in urban China.

Grâce à des données riches et inédites, cet article analyse les inégalités sociales d’accès aux grandes écoles et leur évolution depuis le milieu des années 2000. Malgré les dispositifs d’« ouverture » qui ont été mis en place par certaines grandes écoles pour diversifier le profil de leurs étudiants, ces institutions d’élite sont restées presque entièrement fermées aux élèves issus de milieux sociaux défavorisés et leur base de recrutement n’a guère évolué au cours des quinze dernières années. Cette permanence des inégalités d’accès aux grandes écoles ne s’explique qu’en partie par les écarts de performance scolaire entre les élèves issus de milieux très favorisés et les élèves issus de milieux défavorisés. Elle trouve sa source, en amont, dans l’absence de diversification du recrutement des classes préparatoires et des écoles post-bac au cours de la période. Ce constat d’échec invite à repenser les leviers qui pourraient être mobilisés pour élargir le recrutement des filières sélectives.

La modification annoncée de la procédure de recrutement des deux prestigieux lycées de la capitale est accusée par ses opposants de « briser l’excellence » et de faire le jeu du privé. L’analyse des données de l’académie de Paris va à l’encontre de ces arguments.

We use data from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden over the course of 2020. Policy responses are measured by the Stringency Index and the Economic Support Index from the Blavatnik School of Government. Stringency is systematically associated with lower life satisfaction, controlling for the intensity of the pandemic itself. This stringency effect is larger for women, those with weak ties to the labor market, and in richer households. The effect of the Economic Support is never statistically different from zero.

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.

Disons-le d’emblée : aucun pays n’a inventé de système parfait permettant de lutter contre le racisme et les discriminations. L’enjeu est d’imaginer un nouveau modèle, transnational et universaliste, qui replace la politique antidiscriminatoire dans le cadre plus général d’une politique sociale et économique à visée égalitaire et universelle, et qui assume la réalité du racisme et des discriminations – pour se donner les moyens de les mesurer et de les corriger, sans pour autant figer les identités, qui sont toujours plurielles et multiples.

This article sheds new light on the long-run evolution of political cleavages in 21 Western democracies. We exploit a new database on the socioeconomic determinants of the vote, covering more than 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020. In the 1950s and 1960s, the vote for social democratic, socialist, and affiliated parties was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, giving rise in the 2010s to a disconnection between the effects of income and education on the vote: higher-educated voters now vote for the “left,” while high-income voters continue to vote for the “right.” This transition has been accelerated by the rise of green and anti-immigration movements, whose distinctive feature is to concentrate the votes of the higher-educated and lower-educated electorates. Combining our database with historical data on political parties’ programs, we provide evidence that the reversal of the education cleavage is strongly linked to the emergence of a new “sociocultural” axis of political conflict.

We study job displacement in France. In the medium run, losses in firm-specific wage premium account for a substantial share of tthe overall cost of displacement. However, and despite the positive correlation between premium and productivity in the cross-section of firms, we find that workers are reemployed by high productivity, low labor share firms. The observed reallocation is therefore productivity-enhancing, yet costly for workers. We show that destination firms are less likely to conclude collective wage agreements and have lower participation rates at professional elections. Overall, our results point to a loss in bargaining power.

Public good games are at the core of many environmental challenges. In such social dilemmas, a large share of people endorse the norm of reciprocity. A growing literature complements this finding with the observation that many players exhibit a self-serving bias in reciprocation: « weak reciprocators » increase their contributions as a function of the effort level of the other players, but less than proportionally. In this paper, we build upon a growing literature on truth-telling to argue that weak reciprocity might be best conceived not as a preference, but rather as a symptom of an internal trade-off at the player level between (i) the truthful revelation of their private reciprocal preference, and (ii) the economic incentives they face (which foster free-riding). In truth-telling experiments, many players misrepresent private information when this is to their material benefit, but to a significantly lesser extent than what would be expected based on the profit-maximizing strategy. We apply this behavioral insight to strategic situations, and test whether the preference revelation properties of the classic voluntary contribution game can be improved by offering players the possibility to sign a classic truth-telling oath. Our results suggest that the honesty oath helps increase cooperation (by 33% in our experiment). Subjects under oath contribute in a way which is more consistent with (i) the contribution they expect from the other players and (ii) their normative views about the right contribution level. As a result, the distribution of social types elicited under oath differs from the one observed in the baseline: some free-riders, and many weak reciprocators, now behave as pure reciprocators.

Recent research has shown that there exist gender stereotypes that portray men as more brilliant or inherently talented than women. We provide a large-scale multinational investigation of these stereotypes and their relationship with other gender gaps. Using a survey question asked to more than 500,000 students in 72 countries, we build a measure of the stereotypes associating talent with men and show that they are present in almost all studied countries. These stereotypes are stronger among high-achieving students and in more developed or more gender-egalitarian countries. Similar patterns are observed for gender gaps in competitiveness, self-confidence, and willingness to work in an ICT (Information and Communication Technology)–related occupation. Statistical analysis suggests that these three latter gender gaps could be related to stereotypes associating talent with men. We conclude that these stereotypes should be more systematically considered as a possible explanation for the glass ceiling.

This article first describes the main developments in measuring the upper tail of the income and wealth distributions over the last twenty years. Second, it points out some of the key methodological challenges and how better data could address them. Third, it discusses the academic and policy impacts of upper tail measurement.

Les inégalités sur le marché du travail entre les femmes et les hommes sont importantes : la participation des femmes reste plus faible que celle des hommes, leurs rémunérations sont inférieures en moyenne et elles connaissent des trajectoires professionnelles moins ascendantes que les hommes. La contribution des conditions d’accès à l’emploi à ces inégalités professionnelles reste encore mal connue. Les résultats issus d’études par correspondance (testings) en France suggèrent une discrimination à l’embauche à l’encontre des femmes limitée en moyenne mais qui varie selon les contextes étudiés. Le testing mené par l’Institut des politiques publiques et ISM Corum sous l’égide de la Dares permet de mesurer la discrimination à l’embauche selon le sexe dans des métiers qui varient selon leur niveau de qualification, de féminisation et de difficultés de recrutement. Cette vaste expérimentation a consisté à envoyer des CV fictifs en réponse à plusieurs milliers d’offres d’emploi dans onze métiers distincts en faisant varier les identités sur les candidatures. Ce rapport présente le protocole expérimental mis en œuvre ainsi que les principaux résultats de cette expérimentation.

The existence of a peak at 49 employees in the firm size distribution in France, followed by a permanent decrease in the number of firms has been the starting point of political discourses and academic studies on the cost of size-dependent regulations at 50-employee. These features of the distribution are visible when firm size is declared by employers in fiscal data but not when it is reconstructed from individual-level social security data. This working paper explores these differences both from statistical and institutional viewpoints. It provides evidence showing that a large proportion of employers manipulate the firm size they declare in their fiscal documents. This manipulation generates the particular shape of the size distribution in the fiscal data. We discuss the rationale for such behavior: the key point is that the under-declaration in fiscal data is not subject to substantial sanctions and it can allow firms not to comply with the labor law. Event studies and comparisons of firms below and above the 50-employee threshold suggest that this threshold may only have limited effects on firm performance or growth potential. Consequently the welfare costs of the regulations at 50-employee might be smaller than what was found by some of the studies that assume a perfect compliance with the law.

Cet article examine le rôle joué par les prêts aidés dans l’accès à la propriété et la ségrégation résidentielle des ménages modestes en France. Au cours de la période 1996-2006, le Prêt à taux zéro a bénéficié à 1,4 million de ménages et constitue la principale mesure pour favoriser l’accession à la propriété. L’analyse s’appuie sur les enquêtes Logement (Insee), les registres administratifs du Prêt à taux zéro (SFGFAS) et des entretiens approfondis auprès d’accédants. Elle compare la position de différentes catégories socioprofessionnelles sur le marché du logement avant et après l’introduction du programme. Dans un contexte de hausse des prix de l’immobilier, on constate que le Prêt à taux zéro a limité l’exclusion des ménages modestes du marché du logement neuf, en particulier en dehors de la région parisienne. Pour autant, les ménages ayant bénéficié d’un Prêt à taux zéro ont eu tendance à s’installer plus souvent dans les zones périurbaines et rurales, caractérisées par une moindre proportion de cadres et de professions intellectuelles supérieures si on les compare aux centres villes. De plus, les entretiens suggèrent que les ménages modestes n’avaient pas une perception claire de l’éloignement géographique généré par l’accession à la propriété, ni de ses conséquences sur leur mode de vie et l’accès à certains services publics (systèmes collectifs de garde d’enfants, transports en commun, lycées, opportunités d’emplois).

We propose an assignment model in which positions along a hierarchy are attributed to individuals depending on their characteristics. Our theoretical framework can be used to study differences in assignment and pay-offs across groups and we show how it can motivate decomposition and counterfactual exercises. In an application, we study gender disparities in the public and private sectors with a French exhaustive administrative dataset. The gender wage gap in the public sector is 13.3% and it increases by only 0.7 percentage points when workers are assigned to job positions according to the rules of the private sector.

We define generalized Pareto curves as the curve of inverted Pareto coefficients b(p), where b(p) is the ratio between average income above rank p and the p-th quantile Q(p) (i.e., b(p)=E[X|X>Q(p)]/Q(p))). We use them to characterize income distributions. We develop a method to flexibly recover a continuous distribution based on tabulated income data as is generally available from tax authorities, which produces smooth and realistic shapes of generalized Pareto curves. Using detailed tabulations from quasi-exhaustive tax data, we show the precision of our method. It gives better results than the most commonly used interpolation techniques for the top half of the distribution.

This paper uses relatively large-scale internet survey data from Japan to analyse income comparisons and income satisfaction. In contrast to the vast majority of empirical work in the area of subjective well-being, we are able to measure both the direction (to whom?) and intensity (how much?) dimensions of income comparisons. Relative to Europeans, the Japanese compare more to friends and less to colleagues, and compare their incomes more. The relationship between satisfaction and reference-group income is negative and more negative for those who say that they compare their incomes more. Our main finding concerns the measure of the relevant reference-group income. It is common in non-experimental work to calculate “others’ income” as some conditional or unconditional cell-mean, with the cells being defined by neighbourhood, workplace or demographic type. We show that two such cell-mean measures (one from within the dataset, the other matched in from external sources) fit the well-being data worse than does a simple self-reported measure of what relevant others earn. The self-reported measure of others’ income would arguably make a useful addition to many existing surveys.

Le rapport sur les inégalités mondiales 2022 propose une radiographie inédite des inégalités mondiales, avec la présentation des dernières données sur les écarts de revenu et de patrimoine à travers le monde, ainsi que de nouveaux résultats sur les injustices liées au genre et les inégalités environnementales. Ce travail, mené par une équipe de chercheurs franco-américains et reposant sur les efforts d’une centaine d’économistes à travers le monde, démontre avec force que les inégalités extrêmes qui caractérisent nombre de nos sociétés sont le résultat de choix politiques et n’ont rien d’une fatalité.

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.

We document quasi-experimental evidence against the common assumption in the matching literature that agents have full information on their own preferences. In Germany’s university admissions, the first stages of the Gale-Shapley algorithm are implemented in real time, allowing for multiple offers per student. We demonstrate that nonexploding early offers are accepted more often than later offers, despite not being more desirable. These results, together with survey evidence and a theoretical model, are consistent with students’ costly discovery of preferences. A novel dynamic multioffer mechanism that batches early offers improves matching efficiency by informing students of offer availability before preference discovery.

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.

A recent literature has used a historical perspective to better understand fundamental questions of urban economics. However, a wide range of historical documents of exceptional quality remain underutilised: their use has been hampered by their original format or by the massive amount of information to be recovered. In this paper, we describe how and when the flexibility and predictive power of machine learning can help researchers exploit the potential of these historical documents. We first discuss how important questions of urban economics rely on the analysis of historical data sources and the challenges associated with transcription and harmonisation of such data. We then explain how machine learning approaches may address some of these challenges and we discuss possible applications.

We document quasi-experimental evidence against the common assumption in the matching literature that agents have full information on their own preferences. In Germany’s university admissions, the first stages of the Gale-Shapley algorithm are implemented in real time, allowing for multiple offers per student. We demonstrate that nonexploding early offers are accepted more often than later offers, despite not being more desirable. These results, together with survey evidence and a theoretical model, are consistent with students’ costly discovery of preferences. A novel dynamic multioffer mechanism that batches early offers improves matching efficiency by informing students of offer availability before preference discovery.

Ce chapitre propose un tour d’horizon des enjeux théoriques et pratiques de l’utilisation des algorithmes dans la régulation des inscriptions scolaires et universitaires. Il présente le principe et les enjeux de l’appariement ainsi que les principaux algorithmes qui ont été proposés dans la littérature académique pour affecter les élèves et les étudiants aux établissements d’enseignement. Une attention particulière est portée à l’algorithme d’acceptation différée de Gale et Shapley (1962), qui s’est imposé comme le plus à même de résoudre les arbitrages complexes auxquels sont confrontées les procédures d’affectation.

Les procédures d’affectation centralisées et automatisées ont été déployées dans le système éducatif français au début des années 2000 pour faciliter la gestion de deux transitions majeures dans le parcours des élèves : le passage entre le collège et le lycée, d’une part, l’entrée dans l’enseignement supérieur, d’autre part. À la lumière de la théorie de l’appariement et des travaux empiriques réalisés dans son sillage, ce chapitre propose une analyse critique des procédures qui sont utilisées en France pour réguler les inscriptions dans l’enseignement secondaire (procédure Affelnet au lycée et expérimentation des secteurs multi-collèges) et dans l’enseignement supérieur (plateformes APB et Parcoursup).

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

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention, but there is no consensus as to its definition. We characterize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures based on the time profile of economic resources. We apply this economic-insecurity measure to political-preference data in the USA, UK, and Germany. Conditional on current economic resources, economic insecurity is associated with both greater political participation (support for a party or the intention to vote) and more support for conservative parties. In particular, economic insecurity predicts greater support for both Donald Trump before the 2016 US Presidential election and the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Le Crédit d’impôt pour la compétitivité et l’emploi (CICE), mis en place en 2013, avait pour objectif de stimuler l’emploi et la compétitivité des entreprises en baissant le coût du travail des salariés rémunérés moins de 2,5 fois le Smic. En 2018, cette réduction du coût du travail était égale à 6 % du salaire brut des salariés éligibles. Elle était opérée par un crédit d’impôt sur les sociétés effectif à partir de l’année suivante. Le CICE a eu des effets très modestes pour l’emploi. Une des explications avancées était que, par sa nature de crédit d’impôt, la réduction du coût du travail associée était décalée dans le temps par rapport au versement des salaires, et potentiellement mal prise en compte lors des décisions d’embauche et de salaires. En 2019, le CICE a été transformé en un allègement de cotisations employeur. Le mode de calcul et le montant de la réduction sont inchangés ; en revanche, la réduction apparaît désormais dans les calculs du coût du travail et devient effective immédiatement. Ce rapport présente des premiers résultats, pour les années 2019 et 2020, des effets de cette réforme tant sur les politiques salariales des entreprises que sur l’emploi et les performances de celles-ci.

Trente questions – réponses pour mettre à jour vos connaissances sur le système de retraite : système en points, durée de cotisation, régime universel… La retraite concerne tout le monde, et pas seulement les plus âgés d’entre nous. Avec l’espérance de vie et la durée de vie en retraite qui s’allongent, comprendre le système de retraite est nécessaire. Après avoir dressé un état des lieux sur la démographie de cette catégorie sociale, l’auteur explique le fonctionnement des systèmes de retraites spécifiques et revient sur le traitement des inégalités. Enfin, la question des réformes est posée. Comment fonctionne un système en points ? Qu’est-ce que la durée requise de cotisation ? Quels sont les conséquences des inégalités d’espérance de vie ? Est-ce que le système de retraite français est soutenable financièrement ? Faut-il unifier le système de retraite français ? Autant de questions que l’on se pose et auxquelles cet ouvrage répond.

We show that an institutional change designed expressly to increase democracy for the provision of union services can have a substantial effect on unionization and employment relations. We study a French reform of 2008 that introduced mandatory elections for representation of workers at firm, industry and national levels, putting an end to the oligopoly held until then by five historically established unions. Exploiting random variation in the reform’s date of application in different private sector workplaces, we find that the reform increased union membership by around 8 percentage points and employers’ trust in unions by 45 percent of a standard deviation. The reform also increased workers’ trust in unions, the frequency of walkouts, and it decreased voluntary resignations by about a third. In contrast, it had no effect on firms’ economic or financial outcomes in the short-to-medium run. Taken together, the results suggest that regular free elections can be an effective way to foster participation in unions and workers’ ability to voice concerns, while at the same time making unions more legitimate bargaining partners for employers.

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution and institutional roots of Hong Kong’s growing economic inequality and political cleavages. By combining multiple sources of data (household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings, national accounts) and methodological innovations, two main findings are obtained. First, he evidence suggests a very large rise in income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong over the last four decades. Second, based on the latest opinion poll data, business elites, who carry disproportionate weight in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, are found to be more likely to vote for the pro-establishment camp (presumably to ensure that policies are passed that protect their political and economic interests). This paper argues that the unique alliance of government and business elites in a partially democratic political system is the plausible institutional root of Hong Kong’s rising inequality and political cleavages.

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

D’une ampleur inédite, le dispositif de recours à l’activité partielle a été l’un des principaux leviers d’action de la puissance publique pour le soutien aux entreprises et le maintien des salariés dans leur emploi, notamment lors du premier confinement au deuxième trimestre 2020, au plus fort des restrictions sanitaires mises en place pour lutter contre la pandémie de Covid-19. Un quart de l’activité salariée était ainsi en activité partielle et sur l’ensemble de l’année 2020, 55% des établissements y ont recouru pour une partie au moins de leurs salariés. Ce rapport analyse en 3 parties distinctes les modalités, déterminants et conséquences du recours à l’activité partielle.

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

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

We study the relative impact of custodial and non-custodial sentences on later crime and labor-market outcomes in Denmark, a country where detention conditions are particularly good. To do so, we take advantage of a large-scale reform of the Danish legislation implemented in 2000, whereby incarceration was replaced by a non-custodial sentence for most drunk-driving crimes, which represented a quarter of the custodial sentences inflicted prior to the reform. Our first key finding is that stakeholders anticipated the consequences of the reform: around the time of the reform, the number of cases tried dropped and the nature of the cases changed significantly. To measure the relative impact of incarceration, we therefore resort to a novel instrumental variable approach exploiting quasi-exogenous variation in the probability of being tried after the reform, and therefore incarcerated, based on the crime date. We find that incarcerated offenders commit more crimes and have weaker ties to the labor market after release. The pattern of results suggests that part of the explanation for this increase in offenders’ criminal activities can be found in their greater precariousness.

Rationale The coronavirus pandemic has forced governments to implement a variety of different dynamic lockdown-stringency strategies in the last two years. Extensive lockdown periods could have potential unintended consequences on mental health, at least for at-risk groups. Objective We present novel evidence on the heterogeneous direct and indirect effects of lockdown-stringency measures on individuals’ perception of social isolation (i.e. loneliness) using panel data from five European countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Sweden), which tracks changes in both in-person and remote social interactions between May 2020 and March 2021. Method We combine data from the COME-HERE panel survey (University of Luxembourg) and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT). We implement a dynamic mixture model in order to estimate the loneliness sub-population classes based on the severity of loneliness, as well as the evolution of social interactions. Results While loneliness is remarkably persistent over time, we find substantial heterogeneity across individuals, identifying four latent groups by loneliness severity. Group membership probability varies with age, gender, education and cohabitation status. Moreover, we note significant differences in the impact of social interactions on loneliness by degree of severity. Older people are less likely to feel lonely, but were more affected by lockdown measures, partly due to a reduction in face-to-face interactions. On the contrary, the younger, especially those living alone, report high levels of loneliness that are largely unaffected by changes in the pandemic after lockdown measures were initially implemented. Conclusions Understanding the heterogeneity in loneliness is key for the identification of at-risk populations that can be severely affected by extended lockdown measures. As part of public-health crisis-response systems, it is critical to develop support measures for older individuals living alone, as well as promoting continuous remote communication for individuals more likely to experience high levels of loneliness.

We use British panel data to explore the link between occupational status and life satisfaction. We find puzzling evidence for men of a U-shaped relationship in cross-section data: employees in medium-status occupations report lower life satisfaction scores than those of employees in either low- or high-status occupations. This puzzle disappears in panel data: the satisfaction of any man rises as he moves up the status ladder. The culprit seems to be immobility: the miserable middle is caused by men who have always been in medium-status occupations. There is overall little evidence of a link between occupational status and life satisfaction for women, although this relationship for higher-educated women does look more like that for men.

Understanding what lies behind actual COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is fundamental to help policy makers increase vaccination rates and reach herd immunity. We use June 2021 data from the COME-HERE survey to explore the predictors of actual vaccine hesitancy in France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and Sweden. We estimate a linear-probability model with a rich set of covariates and address issues of common-method variance. 13% of our sample say they do not plan to be vaccinated. Post-Secondary education, home-ownership, having an underlying health condition, and one standard-deviation higher age or income are all associated with lower vaccine hesitancy of 2–4.5% points. Conservative-leaning political attitudes and a one standard-deviation lower degree of confidence in the government increase this probability by 3 and 6% points respectively. Vaccine hesitancy in Spain and Sweden is significantly lower than in the other countries.

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for women. This rise is mirrored in life-satisfaction scores. Men’s life satisfaction changed only little between 2017 and 2020; yet that of women fell dramatically, and sufficiently so to produce a female penalty in life satisfaction. We estimate that almost all of this female penalty is explained by the disproportionate rise in loneliness for women during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper uses an original telepsychology European survey conducted by the EFPA (European Federation of Psychologists Associations) Project Group in e-Health between March 18th and May 5th, 2020, to consider online practices of psychologists. We set up evidence from France compared with other European countries. First, we observe that France is the European country where psychologists’ perception of the concept of online consultations is the worse. It goes through the lowest rate of specific training concerning online consultations. Also France is the European country where psychologists have the worse experience (after Belgium) with online consultations, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Second, we address the issue of determinants of the teleconsultation feelings. We take advantage of this survey panel of 13 European countries that allows us to consider within-country telepractice behaviour. Our results show that a specific training is a key factor for a positive feeling with the concept of online consultation practices. In addition, telepresence (feeling of being connected with one another) and positive overall experience capture the effect of the specific training. French psychologists differ from the other European countries telepsychologists by an absence of specific training effect on the feeling with online consultation that may be explained by the lack of specific training. However, as for European psychologists, French psychologists’ perception of telepractice depends on their level of telepresence and on their overall experience in telepractice.

This paper provides one of the first testsof adaptation tothe complete set ofresidential transitions. We use long-run SOEP panel data and consider the impact of all housing transitions, whether or not they involvea change in housing tenureor geographical movement, on both life satisfaction and housing satisfaction. Controlling for individual characteristics and housing quality, some residential transitionsaffect life satisfactiononly little, while all transitions have a significant effect on housing satisfaction. This latter is particularly large for renters who become homeowners and move geographically,and for renters who move without changing tenure status. Regarding housing satisfaction, we find very little evidence of adaptation even after five years. Losing homeowner status is the only transition that produces lower housing satisfaction, and here the effect seems to become even more negative over time.

A recent literature has used a historical perspective to better understand fundamental questions of urban economics. However, a wide range of historical documents of exceptional quality remain underutilised: their use has been hampered by their original format or by the massive amount of information to be recovered. In this paper, we describe how and when the flexibility and predictive power of machine learning can help researchers exploit the potential of these historical documents. We first discuss how important questions of urban economics rely on the analysis of historical data sources and the challenges associated with transcription and harmonisation of such data. We then explain how machine learning approaches may address some of these challenges and we discuss possible applications.

We explore the effects of adapted physical exercise programs in nursing homes, in which some residents suffer from dementia and/or physical limitations and other do not. We use data from 452 participants followed over 12 months in 32 retirement homes in four European countries. Using a difference-in-difference with individual random effects model, we show that the program has exerted a significant impact on the number of falls and the self-declared health and health-related quality of life of residents (EQ-5D). The wide scope of this study, in terms of sites, countries, and measured outcomes, brings generality to previously existing evidence. A simple computation, in the case of France, suggests that such programs are highly cost-efficient.

We here use panel data from the COME-HERE survey to track income inequality during COVID-19 in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Relative inequality in equivalent household disposable income among individuals changed in a hump-shaped way between January 2020 and January 2021, with an initial rise from January to May 2020 being more than reversed by September 2020. Absolute inequality also fell over this period. Due to the pandemic some households lost more than others, and government compensation schemes were targeted towards the poorest, implying that on average income differences decreased. Generalized Lorenz domination reveals that these distributive changes reduced welfare in Italy.

We consider the effects of major prenatal economic shocks experienced by mothers on two indicatorsof newborn-infant health, birth weight and head circumference, using detailed microdata from the UKALSPAC survey. Controlling for physiological and socioeconomic factors, an economic shock in the first18 weeks of gestation lowers birth weight by 40-70 grams and head circumference by 2-3mm. We findevidence of transmission via poorer maternal health due to absolute material deprivation and tobaccoand alcohol consumption, but not for the endocrinological effects of increased psychosocial anxiety. Thefragile-male hypothesis holds for birth weight but not for head circumference, as predicted by recenttheories on gender differences in prenatal development.

We here use panel data from the COME-HERE survey to track income inequality during COVID-19 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Relative inequality in equivalent household disposable income among individuals changed in a hump-shaped way over 2020. An initial rise from January to May was more than reversed by September. Absolute inequality also fell over this period. As such, policy responses may have been of more benefit for the poorer than for the richer.

This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first confirm that a substantial majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate that lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. Even in this online, purely anonymous environment, the oath significantly reduced the percent of subjects telling “big” lies (by roughly 27%), but did not affect shirking. We also explore whether a truth-telling oath can be used as a screening device if implemented after decisions have been made. Conditional on flipping response, MTurk shirkers and workers who lied were significantly less likely to agree to an ex-post honesty oath. Our results suggest oaths may help elicit more truthful behavior, even in online crowd-sourced environments

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.

The common finding of a zero or negative correlation between the presence of children and parental well-being continues to generate research interest. We consider international data, including well over one million observations on Europeans from 11 years of Eurobarometer surveys. We first replicate this negative finding, both in the overall data and then for most different marital statuses. Children are expensive: controlling for financial difficulties turns our estimated child coefficients positive. We argue that difficulties paying the bills explain the pattern of existing results by parental education and income and by country income and social support. Last, we underline that not all children are the same, with stepchildren commonly having a more negative correlation with well-being than children from the current relationship.

A prospective disease group-based payment is a reimbursement rule used in a wide array of countries. It turns to be the hospital’s payment rule to imply. The secret of this payment is a fee payment as well as a hospital’s activity based payment. There is a consensus to consider this rule of payment as the least likely to be manipulated by the actors. However, the defined fee per group depends on recorded information that is then processed using complex algorithms. What if the data itself can be manipulated? The result would be a fee per group based on manipulated factors that would lead to an inefficient budget allocation between hospitals. Using a unique French longitudinal database with 145 million stays, I unambiguously demonstrate that the implementation of a finer classification led to an upcoding-learning effect. The end result has been a budget transfer from public non-research hospitals to for-profit hospitals. The 2009 policy lead to upcoding disconnected from any changes in the trend of production of care.

Ce rapport documente, de manière aussi précise que possible, l’évolution du recrutement des classes préparatoires et des grandes écoles depuis le milieu des années 2000. L’étude privilégie une approche quantitative s’appuyant sur un ensemble très riche de données administratives qui n’ont pas jusqu’à ce jour été exploitées de manière systématique. Ces données sont mobilisées pour caractériser l’évolution du profil des étudiants de ces formations selon plusieurs dimensions : leur origine sociale, leur genre, leur origine géographique et leur parcours scolaire antérieur.

Demography studies the characteristics of populations. One such characteristic is well-being: this was the subject of the 2019 Wittgenstein Conference. Here, I discuss how objective well-being domains can be summarised to produce an overall well-being score, and how taking self-reported (subjective) well-being into account may help in this effort. But given that there is more than one type of subjective well-being score, we would want to know which one is “best”. We would also need to decide whose well-being counts, or counts more than that of others. Finally, I briefly mention the potential role of adaptation and social comparisons in the calculation of societal well-being.

France has experienced a clear reversal of older workers’ labor force par-ticipation (LFP) and employment rates over the last 15 years. These two rates had continuously declined in the 1970s and the 1980s for the 60–64 age group, bringing employment rates at a low 10 percent for both genders.

We here use panel data from the COME-HERE survey to track income inequality during COVID-19 in France, Germany,Italy, Spain and Sweden. Relative inequality in equivalent household disposable income among individuals changed in ahump-shaped way over 2020. An initial rise from January to May was more than reversed by September. Absoluteinequality also fell over this period. As such, policy responses may have been of more benefit for the poorer than thericher.

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood experiences on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effects of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth-cohorts, child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier NCDS cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BCS.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments to implement lockdowns. While lockdowns may help to contain the spread of the virus, they may result in substantial damage to population well-being. We use Google Trends data to test whether the lockdowns implemented in Europe and America led to changes in well-being related topic search terms. Using differences-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of lockdown, we find a substantial increase in the search intensity for boredom in Europe and the US. We also found a significant increase in searches for loneliness, worry and sadness, while searches for stress, suicide and divorce on the contrary fell. Our results suggest that people’s mental health may have been severely affected by the lockdown.

Background and Aim: Does spatial organization of healthcare access still matter in China? I assess how e-health has transformed the notion of healthcare access and what spatial dimension of healthcare means in China today and in the near future. I also consider a dynamic perspective to propose keys to anticipate upcoming changes. Hong Kong has a very efficient healthcare system with a dense network of high-level hospitals and a high level of healthcare access. In major Chinese urban centers, a deliberate policy to improve healthcare availability has resulted in a spectacular increase in the number of healthcare structures over the last two decades. This includes urban healthcare centers and outpatient clinics. Nevertheless, the most of the population faces explicit and implicit financial penalties to get full healthcare access. To solve the problem, a digital health revolution is emerging. Methods: I use a qualitative case study approach. I conducted a series of semi-structured, face-to-face interviews to evaluate experiences, expectations, and opinions of patients regarding healthcare access and its associated financial burden as well as their use of digital health. Results: I assessed how e-health has transformed the notion of healthcare access and what spatial dimension of healthcare means today and in the near future in China. I also considered a dynamic perspective to propose keys to anticipate upcoming changes. Healthcare centers tend to shift from a place to get cured to a link within an e-healthcare pathway. For instance, this is a place to get e-prescribed medication. Advantages of this shift include a reduction in the cost of healthcare and remote access to highly qualified medical staff, bypassing the lack of trust in the quality of care offered in local hospitals. Conclusion: A forward-looking approach suggests that e-healthcare is becoming the entry point to healthcare for a large part of the population. Relevance to Patients: This study informs the policy makers of upcoming changes, and contributes to understanding and anticipating modifications needed in the healthcare system.

Spatial mismatch relates the unemployment and poverty of vulnerable population groups to their remoteness from job opportunities. Although the intuition initially applied to African Americans in US inner cities, spatial mismatch has a broader validity beyond the sole US context. In light of a detailed presentation of the mechanisms at work, we present the main results from various empirical tests of the spatial mismatch theory. Since key aspects of that theory remain to be tested, we also discuss methodological approaches and provide guidance for further research. We derive lessons for policy implications and comment on the appropriateness of related urban policies.

We here use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to provide one of the first analyses of the distal (early-life) and proximal (later-life) correlates of older-life subjective well-being. Unusually, we have two distinct measures of the latter: happiness and eudaimonia. Even after controlling for proximal covariates, outcomes at age 18 (IQ score, parental income and parental education) remain good predictors of well-being over 50 years later. In terms of the proximal covariates, mental health and social participation are the strongest predictors of both measures of well-being in older age. However, there are notable differences in the other correlates of happiness and eudaimonia. As such, well-being policy will depend to an extent on which measure is preferred.

Depuis la rentrée 2017, la Ville et l’Académie de Paris expérimentent une nouvelle méthode d’affectation des élèves aux collèges publics : les secteurs multi-collèges. Ce dispositif consiste à définir des secteurs communs à plusieurs collèges géographiquement proches de manière à rééquilibrer leur recrutement social. En s’appuyant sur des données très riches mises à disposition par le rectorat de Paris, ce rapport évalue l’impact des secteurs multi-collèges sur la mixité sociale et sur les comportements d’évitement.

Measuring and understanding the evolution of wealth inequality is a key challenge for researchers, policy makers, and the general public. This paper breaks new ground on this topic by presenting a new method to estimate and study wealth inequality. This method combines fiscal data with household surveys and national accounts in order to provide annual wealth distribution series, with detailed breakdowns by percentiles, age, and assets. Using the case of France as an illustration, we show that the resulting series can be used to better analyze the evolution and the determinants of wealthinequality dynamics over the 1970-2014 period. We show that the decline in wealth inequality ends in the early 1980s, marking the beginning of a rise in the top 1% wealth share, though with significant fluctuations due largely to asset price movements. Rising inequality in savings rates coupled with highly stratified rates of returns has led to rising wealth concentration in spite of the opposing effect of house price increases. We develop a simple simulation model highlighting how changes in the combination of unequal savings rates, rates of return, and labor earnings that occurred in the early 1980s generated large multiplicative effects that led to radically different steady-state levels of wealth inequality. Taking advantage of the joint distribution of income and wealth, we show that top wealth holders are almost exclusively top capital earners, and increasingly fewer are made up of top labor.

We here address the causal relationship between maternal depression and child human capital using UK cohort data. We exploit the conditionally-exogenous variation in mothers’ genomes in an instrumental-variable approach, and describe the conditions under which mother’s genetic variants can be used as valid instruments. An additional episode of maternal depression between the child’s birth up to age nine reduces both their cognitive and non-cognitive skills by 20 to 45% of a SD throughout adolescence. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests addressing, among others, concerns about pleiotropy and the maternal transmission of genes to her child.

We here consider the cognitive and noncognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to show that early childhood financial problems are associated with worse adolescent cognitive and noncognitive outcomes, controlling for both income and a set of standard variables, and in value‐added models controlling for children’s earlier age‐5 outcomes. The estimated effect of financial problems is almost always larger in size than that of income. Around one‐quarter to one‐half of the effect of financial problems on the noncognitive outcomes seems to transit through mother’s mental health.

We use annual data on over 150 countries between 2005 and 2018 to look at the relationship between subjective well-being (both cognitive and affective) and the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI appears to be more closely related to cognitive than affective well-being. We also consider the relationships between the three HDI components (the Income, Health and Education Indices) and well-being, and find that, on average, the Income Index has the strongest predictive power. Importantly, we find that the three HDI components only matter equally in Western and rich countries. Our analysis contributes to the discussion about cultural sensitivity in paradigms of societal development in two ways. We first show that differences in preferences towards development aims exist. Second, we propose a weighting procedure for a culturally-sensitive version of the HDI.

Dans le cadre d’un partenariat avec l’institut Rousseau, la revue Études a réuni les économistes Gaël Giraud et Thomas Piketty pour débattre sur leurs critiques du capitalisme et mieux discerner leurs points de désaccord. Nous leur avons soumis ces questions : dans le contexte actuel de menace de désastre écologique et social, le capitalisme est-il réformable ? Quelles sont vos propositions respectives ? Deux thèmes principaux ont été abordés : le traitement des inégalités et la critique de la sacralisation de la propriété privée.

We here consider the relationship between workplace gender measures and employees’ perceived job quality, where the former cover both the gender mix of workers with the same job title and the gender of the immediate boss. Data from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey show that men’s job evaluation is higher in gender-balanced job positions at the workplace, while that of women is higher in either gender-balanced or male-dominated positions. The gender of the immediate boss plays no significant role in employee job evaluation. There is some evidence that these correlations differ by job-quality domains. We introduce co-worker support and help, gender discrimination, and unwanted sexual attention as possible mediators of the gender-mix correlations: these change the estimated coefficients only little. Our estimated correlations could therefore reflect a pure preference for job-position gender composition. Last, we use a bounding approach to show that our main results are robust to the potential influence of unobservables. Overall, job-position gender diversity is associated with higher worker well-being.

We use data from the COME-HERE longitudinal survey collected by the University of Luxembourg to assess the effects of the policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden over the course of 2020. Policy responses are measured by the Stringency Index and the Economic Support Index from the Blavatnik School of Government. Stringency is systematically associated with lower life satisfaction, controlling for the intensity of the pandemic itself. This stringency effect is larger for women, those with weak ties to the labour market, and in richer households. The effect of the Economic Support is never statistically different from zero.

This paper studies why PhDs in France take longer to find stable jobs than engineers. Using data from CEREQ’s “Génération 2004” survey, we show that job finding rates of PhDs are lower than those of engineers and document the differences in their observable characteristics and fields of study. We show that this phenomenon is due to multiple factors: heterogeneity in student characteristics along observable and unobservable dimensions and fields of study, directed search toward public sector positions (especially professors) among PhDs and, in all likelihood, reservation wages of PhDs for private sector jobs that are “too high” relative to their value of marginal product.

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.

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

Depuis les années 1980, les inégalités sont reparties à la hausse dans la plupart des régions du monde, après une période relativement égalitaire dans l’après-guerre. Faut-il y voir la conséquence implacable de la mondialisation et de la technologie, ou bien plutôt un phénomène proprement politique et idéologique ? Pourquoi de nouvelles coalitions électorales unies par d’ambitieux programmes de redistribution des richesses tardent-elles à se développer, et quel est le lien avec la montée de nouveaux conflits identitaires, incarnée par les succès de Trump aux États-Unis, Le Pen en France, Modi en Inde ou encore Bolsonaro au Brésil ? Cet ouvrage collectif offre des pistes de réponses à ces questions en retraçant la transformation des clivages politiques dans 50 pays entre 1948 et 2020. À partir de l’exploitation d’enquêtes électorales couvrant de manière inédite les cinq continents, l’ouvrage étudie le lien entre les comportements de vote et les principales caractéristiques des électeurs telles que le revenu, le diplôme, le genre ou l’identité ethno-religieuse. Cette analyse permet de comprendre comment les mouvements politiques sont amenés à coaliser des intérêts et identités multiples dans les démocraties contemporaines. Une telle perspective historique et mondiale s’avère indispensable pour mieux appréhender l’avenir de la démocratie au XXIe siècle.

This paper investigates the impact of delaying retirement on mortality among the French population. We take advantage of the 1993 pension reform in the private sector to identify the causal effect of an increase in claiming age on mortality. We use administrative data which provide detailed information on career characteristics, dates of birth and death. Our results, precisely estimated, show that an exogenous increase of one year in the claiming age has no significant impact on the probability to die, measured between age 61 and 79, even when we allow for nonlinear effects of treatment intensity. To test the power of our sample to detect statistically significant effects for rare events like death, we compute minimum detectable effects (MDEs). Our MDE estimates suggest that, if an impact of later retirement on mortality would be detectable, it would remain very small in magnitude.

L’efficacité de l’action publique constitue une préoccupation croissante des autorités, qui sont amenées à solliciter de plus en plus souvent les résultats issus de la recherche en sciences économiques. La contribution de ces travaux à l’élaboration des politiques publiques tient à leur capacité à analyser et comprendre la manière dont les acteurs économiques réagissent aux évolutions de l’environnement dans lequel ils prennent leurs décisions. Ce raisonnement repose sur des hypothèses de comportement fortes, faisant l’objet d’un nouveau courant de recherche, l’économie comportementale, qui allie psychologie et économie afin d’affiner la compréhension des déterminants des décisions. Ce livre dresse un panorama des apports de ce nouveau courant à la définition et à l’évaluation des politiques publiques. Il décrit les nouveaux outils d’intervention, comme les nudges, tout en soulignant la pertinence des outils d’intervention traditionnels. Il en propose une application en matière d’économie de la santé, de choix d’épargne et de retraite, de politique environnementale et de régulation du marché du travail.

Ce rapport de recherche est consacré à l’analyse de l’impact du crédit impôt recherche (CIR) sur l’investissement en R&D, l’innovation et les performances économiques des entreprises. L’analyse exploite des données administratives sur l’ensemble des entreprises françaises, jusqu’alors peu mobilisées pour évaluer l’impact du CIR.

À partir de données riches et inédites, cet article analyse les disparités géographiques d’accès aux grandes écoles et leur évolution depuis la fin des années 2000. Malgré les dispositifs d’« ouverture sociale » qui ont été mis en place par certaines grandes écoles pour diversifier le profil de leurs étudiants, la base géographique de recrutement de ces formations d’élite reste étroite et n’a guère évolué au cours de la période. Alors que les Parisiens ne représentent que 3 % de la population, ils constituaient 8 % des effectifs des grandes écoles en 2016-2017 et près de 25 % des effectifs des écoles les plus prestigieuses. À l’inverse, les non-Franciliens, qui représentent 82 % de la population, ne constituaient que 70 % des effectifs des écoles et 49 % des effectifs des écoles les plus prestigieuses. Les inégalités géographiques d’accès aux grandes écoles ne s’expliquent qu’en partie par les écarts moyens de performance scolaire et de composition sociale entre les départements d’Île-de-France et les autres départements. Leur persistance trouve notamment sa source, en amont, dans l’absence de diversification du recrutement des classes préparatoires et des écoles post-bac au cours de la période étudiée. La très forte concentration spatiale de ces filières sur le territoire francilien, particulièrement pour les plus sélectives d’entre elles, tend à avantager les élèves originaires d’Île-de-France dans l’accès aux grandes écoles.

Plusieurs réformes récentes en Europe se sont donné comme objectifs de simplifier leur système de protection sociale et d’améliorer l’accès aux prestations sociales pour limiter le non-recours. Parmi ces réformes, celle du Universal Credit menée au Royaume-Uni depuis 2012, fait écho à ces préoccupations : elle vise à simplifier le système de protection sociale britannique en introduisant une nouvelle allocation généraliste, venant agréger une partie des prestations déjà existantes. En parallèle, la réforme est aussi caractérisée par une conditionnalité renforcée en matière de recherche d’emploi et répond à un objectif d’activation des dépenses de prestations sociales. La réforme s’accompagne également d’un changement très profond du système d’information et de gestion des prestations sociales qui devient entièrement digitalisé et automatisé. Cette réforme s’inscrit dans un contexte plus large où la question de l’architecture de la protection sociale revient de manière récurrente dans le débat public, sous la forme des propositions de revenu universel, de revenu de base, ou encore de revenu universel d’activité. Outre le contenu de la réforme britannique, son ampleur et ses conditions de mise en place, sont autant de matière à réflexions sur la façon de penser des réformes de la protection sociale. Ce rapport propose des éléments de bilan de la réforme, à la fois au regard des objectifs fixés et sur les conditions de mise en œuvre.

This study estimates how much tax revenue the European Union could collect by imposing a minimum tax on the profits of multinational companies. We compute the tax deficit of multinational firms, defined as the difference between what multinationals currently pay in taxes, and what they would pay if they were subject to a minimum tax rate in each country. We then consider three ways for EU countries to collect this tax deficit. First, we simulate an international agreement on a minimum tax of the type currently discussed by the OECD, favored by a number of European Union countries, and by the United States. In this scenario, each EU country would collect the tax deficit of its own multinationals. For instance, if the internationally agreed minimum tax rate is 25% and a German company has an effective tax rate of 10% on the profits it records in Singapore, then Germany would impose an additional tax of 15% on these profits to arrive at an effective rate of 25%. More generally, Germany would collect extra taxes so that its multinationals pay at least 25% in taxes on the profits they book in each country. Other nations would proceed similarly. We find that such a 25% minimum tax would increase corporate income tax revenues in the European Union by about €170 billion in 2021. This sum represents more than 50% of the amount of corporate tax revenue currently collected in the European Union and 12% of total EU health spending. The revenue potential of a coordinated minimum tax is thus large. However, revenues significantly depend on the commonly agreed minimum tax rate. With a 21% minimum rate, the European Union would collect about €100 billion in 2021. Moving from 21% to 15% would reduce the potential revenue by a factor of two to about €50 billion. Second, we simulate an incomplete international agreement in which only EU countries apply a minimum tax, while non-EU countries do not change their tax policies. In this scenario, each EU country would collect the tax deficit of its own multinationals (as in our first scenario), plus a portion of the tax deficit of multinationals incorporated outside of the European Union, based on the destination of sales. For instance, if a British company makes 20% of its sales in Germany, then Germany would collect 20% of the tax deficit of this company. We find that that in such a scenario, using a rate of 25% to compute the tax deficit of each multinational, the European Union would increase its corporate tax revenues about €200 billion. Out of this total, €170 billion would come from collecting the tax deficit of EU multinationals; an additional €30 billion would come from collecting a portion of the tax deficit of non-EU multinationals. For the European Union, there is thus a much higher revenue potential from increasing taxes on EU companies than from taxing non-EU companies. To improve the fairness of its tax system and generate new government revenues (e.g., to pay for the cost of Covid-19), it is essential that the European Union polices its own multinationals. Last, we estimate how much revenue each EU country could collect unilaterally, assuming all other countries keep their current tax policy unchanged. This corresponds to a “first-mover” scenario, in which one country alone decides to collect the tax deficit of multinational companies. This first mover would collect the full tax deficit of its own multinationals, plus a portion (proportional to the destination of sales) of the tax deficit of all foreign multinationals, based on a reference rate of 25%. We find that a first mover in the European Union would increase its corporate tax revenues by close to 70% relative to its current corporate tax collection. Although international coordination is always preferable, a unilateral move of a single EU member state (or a group of member states) would encourage other EU countries to also collect the tax deficit of multinationals—as not doing so would mean leaving tax revenues on the table for the first movers to grab. This could pave the way for an ambitious agreement on a high minimum tax, within the European Union and then globally. This analysis shows that unilateral action can play a transformative role and that refusing international coordination is not a sustainable solution, since other countries can always choose to collect the taxes that tax havens choose not to collect. Our estimates are based on a transparent methodology that combines newly available macroeconomic data on the location and effective tax rates of multinational profits. We illustrate and validate our approach by applying it to firm-level data publicly disclosed by all European banks and 16 large non-bank multinationals. We find that European banks would have to pay 41% more in taxes if they were subject to a 25% country-by-country minimum tax. This estimate is in line with our finding that EU multinationals as a whole (all sectors combined) would have to pay around 50% more in taxes, thus suggesting that this number is indeed the correct order of magnitude. Companies such as Shell, Iberdrola, and Allianz—who voluntarily disclose their country-by-country profits and taxes—would also have to pay 35%-50% more in taxes if they were subject to a 25% minimum tax. This report is supplemented by a pioneering interactive website, https://tax-deficitsimulator.herokuapp.com. This new tool allows policy makers, journalists, members of civil society, and all citizens in each EU country to assess the revenue potential from minimum taxation on both domestic and foreign firms. Users can select various scenarios (e.g., international coordination or unilateral action), and a full range of minimum tax rates from 10% to 50%. All the data and computer code are available online, making our estimates fully reproducible. We plan to regularly update our findings, as improved and more comprehensive macroeconomic data sources become available, refined estimation techniques are designed, and more companies publicly disclose their country-by-country reports.

Tous les systèmes de santé des pays de l’OCDE font face à des défis similaires : conjuguer un accès au soin le plus large possible à une maîtrise des coûts. Comme dans d’autres secteurs, la digitalisation offre des opportunités pour faire face à ces défis. La crise sanitaire que nous avons traversée et qui se poursuit aujourd’hui a profondément accéléré cette mutation des systèmes de santé. Cependant, le développement de l’e-santé que nous connaissons en Europe vient en appoint d’un système plus traditionnel. En Chine ou aux Etats-Unis, à l’inverse, l’e-santé tend à prendre une place centrale. L’objectif de cet article est de donner un état des lieux dans ces deux pays sans analyse des conséquences en termes de bénéfices et des limites. Toutefois, la question de l’information, sa confidentialité et son usage est au cœur de cette évolution.

Chapter 12 by Facundo Alvaredo, Lydia Assouad and Thomas Piketty is concerned with measuring inequality in the Middle East. Here, the authors reference and combine all income data existing in the region – household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data – in order to estimate income concentration in the region for the period 1990–2016. According to their benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64%, compared to 37% in Western Europe, 47% in the US and 55% in Brazil. This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil-rich and population-rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which is probably under-estimated, given limited access to accurate fiscal data). The authors stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East and hope more research can shed light on the dynamics of income concentration, within-country inequality, as well as the drivers of such extreme levels.

français: Ce papier examine pourquoi les docteurs prennent plus de temps à trouver un emploi stable que les ingénieurs en France. En utilisant les données de l’enquête « Génération 2004 » du CEREQ, nous présentons les différences entre les caractéristiques observables et les domaines de spécialisation entre ingénieurs et différents types de docteur et nous démontrons que la vitesse d’insertion des docteurs est plus lente que celle des ingénieurs. Ceci s’explique par des multiples facteurs : des différences entre les caractéristiques observables et inobservables, des diplômes, les choix de domaine de spécialisation, une recherche des docteurs dirigée vers des postes de fonctionnaire (surtout des postes de professeur) et un salaire de réserve vraisemblablement « trop élevé » par rapport à la valeur de la productivité marginale des docteurs pour des postes du secteur privé.

We here consider the link between individual financial profiles over time and well‐being, as measured by life satisfaction. We in particular look at annual self‐reported financial worsening and improvement information for over 25,000 individuals in Australian panel data from 2002 to 2017. We first find that satisfaction falls (rises) with a contemporaneous major financial worsening (improvement), with the largest correlation being with financial worsening. Second, the experience of these financial events in the past continues to be linked to current well‐being. Last, only the order of financial‐improvement spells relates to well‐being: a given number of past years where finances deteriorated has the same association with current well‐being whether the deterioration occurred in one continuous spell or was interrupted. We last show that these associations are heterogeneous over the distribution of well‐being.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread school shutdowns, with many continuing distance education via online-learning platforms. We here estimate the causal effects of online education on student exam performance using administrative data from Chinese Middle Schools. Taking a difference-in-differences approach, we find that receiving online education during the COVID-19 lockdown improved student academic results by 0.22 of a standard deviation, relative to pupils without learning support from their school. Not all online education was equal: students who were given recorded online lessons from external higher-quality teachers had higher exam scores than those whose lessons were recorded by teachers from their own school. The educational benefits of distance learning were the same for rural and urban students, but the exam performance of students who used a computer for online education was better than those who used a smartphone. Last, while everyone except the very-best students performed better with online learning, it was low achievers who benefited from teacher quality.

En présentant l’évolution en longue durée des inégalités entre classes sociales dans les sociétés humaines, Thomas Piketty propose une perspective nouvelle sur l’histoire de l’égalité. Il s’appuie sur une conviction forte forgée au fil de ses recherches : la marche vers l’égalité est un combat qui vient de loin, et qui ne demande qu’à se poursuivre au xxie siècle, pour peu que l’on s’y mette toutes et tous.

In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers-who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school-by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest « yes and no. » We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were (a) significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but (b) were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.

We develop a new dartboard methodology to delineate urban areas using detailed information about building location, which we implement using a map of all buildings in France. For each pixel, our approach compares actual building density after smoothing to counterfactual smoothed building density computed after randomly redistributing buildings. We define as urban any area with statistically significant excess building density. Within urban areas, extensions to our approach allow us to distinguish ‘core’ urban pixels and detect centres and subcentres. Finally, we develop novel one- and two-sided tests that provide a statistical basis to compare maps with different delineations, which we use to assess the robustness of our approach and to document large differences between our preferred delineation and the corresponding official one.

Does giving taxpayers a voice over the destination of tax revenues lead to more honest income declarations? Previous experiments have shown that giving participants the opportunity to select the organization that receives their tax funds tends to increase tax compliance. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this increase in compliance is induced by the sole fact of giving subjects a choice—a “direct democracy effect”. To that aim, we ask participants to a tax evasion game to choose, in a collective or individual choice setting, between two very similar organizations which provide the same social (ecological) benefits. We elicit compliance for both organizations before the choice is made so as to control for the counter-factual compliance decision. We find that democracy does not increase compliance, and even observe a slight negative effect—in particular for women. Our results confirm the existence of a commitment effect of democracy, leading to favor more the selected organization when it was actively chosen. The commitment effect of democracy is however not enough to overcome the decrease in the level of compliance. Thanks to response times data, we show that prior choice on similar options as compared to a purely random selection weakens the preference for honesty. One important field application of our results is that democracy in tax spending must offer real choices to tax payers to improve compliance.

Paris School of Economics (PSE) observe empiriquement comment la discrimination se concentre sur certains salariés qui sont en position d’exercer un contrepouvoir légal au sein des entreprises, et tout particulièrement comment elle s’exerce à l’encontre des délégués syndicaux.

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

Based on linked administrative and survey panel data, we analyze the labour supply behaviour of physicians who could adopt either a standard fee-for-service contract or a mixed remuneration (MR) contract. Under MR, physicians received a per diem and a reduced fee for services provided. We present estimates of a structural discrete choice model that incorporates service intensity (services provided per hour) and contract choice into a labour supply framework. We use our estimates to predict (ex ante) the effects of contracts on physician behaviour and welfare, as measured by average equivalent variations. The supply of services is reduced under a MR contract, suggesting incentives matter. Hours spent seeing patients is less sensitive to incentives than the supply of services. Our results suggest that a reform forcing all physicians to adopt the MR system would have substantially larger effects on physician behaviour than were measured under the observed reform. A pure salary (per diem) reform would sharply reduce services but would increase time spent seeing patients.

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

Laws not only affect behavior due to changes in material payoffs, but they may also change the perception individuals have of social norms, either by shifting them directly or by providing information on these norms. Using detailed daily survey data and exploiting the introduction of lockdown measures in the UK in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis, we provide causal evidence that the law drastically changed the perception of the norms regarding social distancing behaviors. We show that this effect of laws on perceived norms is mostly driven by an informational channel and that the intervention made perceptions of social norms converge to the actual prevalent norm.

Purpose A small literature has shown that individual wellbeing varies with the price of company stock, but it is unclear whether this is due to wealth effects amongst those holding stock, or more general effects on sentiment, with individuals taking rising stock prices as an indicator of improvements in the economy. The authors contribute to this literature by using two data sets to establish the relationship between share prices on the one hand and worker wellbeing on the other. Design/methodology/approach First, the authors use over 20 years of British panel data to show that employee happiness and job satisfaction moves with share prices among those whose pay is partly determined by company fortunes. The authors then examine share price movements and employee stock holding in a single corporation and provide suggestive evidence that an increase in the firm’s stock price increases the well-being of those who belong to its employee share purchase plan (ESPP). These effects are greatest among those making the largest monthly contributions to the program who have the most to gain (or lose) from stock price fluctuations. There is also tentative evidence that the well-being effects of a higher share price are larger for those who hold more shares. Taken together these results suggest that, although stock price movements have little effect on well-being in the population at large, the well-being of those holding stock in their own company rises when the price of that stock is higher, suggesting the effects of share prices work at least partly via changes in wealth. Findings Taken together these results suggest that the wellbeing effects of share prices work at least partly via changes in wealth. Research limitations/implications The authors cannot be certain that the job satisfaction movements they see are causally linked to share plan participation and bonus receipt. Future research might fruitfully examine the mechanisms at play, and whether the effects identified here are linked to differences in employee motivation and effort over the business cycle. Practical implications Firms may wish to consider the appropriateness of linking their workers’ pay to firm performance through share plans or profit shares to establish whether this improves worker wellbeing. Social implications The utility of workers may increase where firms offer some compensation via a share plan or profit share. Originality/value The literature suggests a link between share price movements and worker wellbeing, but the reasons for the link are contested. Using two very different data sources, the authors are able to show that share price increases induce higher worker wellbeing, at least in part, through wealth effects.

We propose a new nonparametric approach to estimate the production function for housing. Our estimation treats output as a latent variable and relies on a first-order condition for profit maximization combined with a zero-profit condition. More desirable locations command higher land prices and, in turn, more capital to build houses. For parcels of a given size, we compute housing production by summing across the marginal products of capital. For newly built single-family homes in France, the production function for housing is close to constant returns and is well, though not perfectly, approximated by a Cobb-Douglas function with a capital elasticity of 0.65.

Cette étude a été commanditée par le Comité d’évaluation des réformes de la fiscalité du capital, sous l’égide de France Stratégie, afin de comprendre l’impact de l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF), et de sa conversion en impôt sur la fortune immobilière (IFI), sur le financement, l’investissement, l’emploi et la gouvernance des entreprises françaises.

Une grande partie des interactions économiques importantes ont lieu de manière non simultanée, c’est-à-dire qu’une partie entreprend une action dans l’espoir qu’un autre acteur se comportera comme promis dans le futur. Ces transactions ont lieu entre des individus, des entreprises et des États. Pour que ces transactions soient entreprises, les participants doivent croire que la contrepartie se comportera comme promis – c’està-dire qu’ils ont besoin de confiance. La question centrale qui traverse mes travaux est la suivante : « Comment les politiques doivent-elles répondre à un manque de confiance ? ». Une partie de la réponse à cette question est clairement « construire plus de confiance », et donc un sous-thème important de mon travail consiste à examiner quelles politiques peuvent être propices à la construction de la confiance. Dans de nombreuses circonstances, cependant, il existe des contraintes fondamentales sur la mesure dans laquelle les parties peuvent se faire confiance. Dans ces cas, la question pertinente devient donc « comment les politiques peuvent-elles atténuer les conséquences négatives du manque de confiance ? ».

This chapter describes the main impact evaluation methods, both experimental and quasi-experimental, and the statistical model underlying them. Some of the most important methodological advances to have recently been put forward in this field of research are presented. We focus not only on the need to pay particular attention to the accuracy of the estimated effects, but also on the requirement to replicate assessments, carried out by experimentation or quasi-experimentation, in order to distinguish false positives from proven effects.

Cet article décrit la situation du système de santé avant l’épidémie de SARS-COV 2. Il expose la logique qui sous-tend les « réformes » depuis 20 ans. La tarification à l’activité (T2A) est présentée en y retracant sa génèse, ses avantages et ses limites dans un contexte d’un Objectif National de Dépenses d’Assurance Maladie (ONDAM) resséré. La situation en psychiatrie est alors décrite. Son poids économique oblige à en réguler les dépenses. Toutefois, les modalités de prise en charge des patients en psychiatrie entre en conflit avec la logique même de la T2A car cette activité médicale ne peut pas se penser sans impliquer l’ambulatoire à travers un parcours de soins du patient. Cet article montre ensuite les implications du virage ambulatoire vers l’extrahospitalier et les parcours de santé en lien avec le social, le médicosocial et les aidants. L’expérience de la psychiatrie est prise en exemple pour en dépeindre les complexités. Cet article aborde alors la charge que ce virage engendre pour les aidants dans le système de soin, passage du soin hospitalier au parcours, passage de l’hôpital producteur de soins à l’hôpital élément de la santé d’une population. Puis, mettant en évidence un système de santé en pleine mutation, il relève les adaptions que les acteurs du système ont été capable d’entreprendre pour faire face à la pandémie. Il en dégage ainsi des enseignements et des perspectives de cet crise sanitaire. Cet article conclut sur l’importance d’une offre structurée suivant un continuum de soins du médecin généraliste à l’hôpital et inversement pour une continuité des soins pour le patient.

In this paper, we mobilize newly available historical series from the World Inequality Database to construct world income distribution estimates from 1820 to 2020. We find that the level of global income inequality has always been very large, reflecting the persistence of a highly hierarchical world economic system. Global inequality increased between 1820 and 1910, in the context of the rise of Western dominance and colonial empires, and then stabilized at a very high level between 1910 and 2020. Between 1820 and 1910, both between-countries and within-countries inequality were increasing. In contrast, these two components of global inequality have moved separately between 1910 and 2020: Within-countries inequality dropped in 1910–1980 (while between-countries inequality kept increasing) but rose in 1980–2020 (while between-countries inequality started to decline). As a consequence of these contradictory and compensating evolutions, early 21st century neo-colonial capitalism involves similar levels of inequality as early 20th century colonial capitalism, though it is based on a different set of rules and institutions. We also discuss how alternative rules such as fiscal revenue sharing could lead to a significant drop in global inequality. (JEL: N30, O10, O40)

Objective: To determine the factors that affect enrollment and full participation (adherence) in the PRADO home-based postnatal coordinated care program in France after hospital discharge. Methods: A population-based retrospective study was performed using the public health insurance database for the Yvelines district in France. The study population included all affiliated women admitted for delivery and classified as low risk in 2013. These women were eligible for home-based midwifery support after their discharge from the hospital. The enrollment and full participation of the women in home-based postnatal coordinated care were modeled using a simple probit model. Full participation in the home-based postnatal coordinated care was also modeled using a probit Heckman selection model in order to assess the self-selection process of enrollment in the program. The control variables were the characteristics of the patients, the municipalities, and the hospitals. Results: 2,859 (68.3%) of the 4,189 eligible women chose to participate in the home-based postnatal coordinated care program, of whom 2,496 (59.6% of the eligible women) subsequently took part in the entire PRADO program. On the one hand, enrollment in the home-based postnatal coordinated care was influenced mostly by family context variables including the woman’s age at the time of her pregnancy and the number of children in the household, the woman’s level of information including prenatal education and prenatal information regarding postpartum care, as well as hospital variables including characteristics and organization of the maternity units. On the other hand, full participation in the home-based postnatal coordinated care was influenced by the accessibility to health professionals, particularly midwives. 3 Furthermore, both the woman’s level of information and accessibility to health professionals correlated with the socioeconomic environment. Conclusion: Women who become pregnant at a very early or late stage of their life as well as women with low levels of prenatal education and prenatal information regarding postpartum care have a relatively low rate of participation in home-based postnatal coordinated care. A public health policy promoting awareness of prenatal as well as postnatal issues could increase the participation in this coordinated community care. In addition, reducing regional inequality is likely to have a positive impact, as the availability of midwives is a key factor for participation in home-based postnatal coordinated care.

Women occupy important roles in families and communities, yet their health specificities limit their agency and maintain the glass ceiling. The objective was to identify factors influencing women’s decision-making at maternity and during menopause. Documents (373 pages) from an interdisciplinary conference were analyzed inductively using critical theory. Women’s agency is influenced by (1) regulatory power and financial circumstances; (2) health professional power; and (3) culture, society and family. The wellbeing of newborns drive social and health professionals’ behavior. Around menopause, women often feel left alone at moments of healthrelated decision-making. To enhance women’s agency, a multi-dimensional approach should be considered.

Instaurées à une époque où le mariage était la forme prédominante de la vie en couple et se terminait rarement par un divorce, et dans lequel l’homme était le principal pourvoyeur de ressources du ménage, les pensions de réversion sont aujourd’hui régulièrement débattues, aussi bien sur leur pertinence que sur leur efficacité. La transition du système de retraite actuel en annuité, composé de nombreux régimes, vers un système universel en points conduirait non seulement à unifier les dispositifs de droits conjugaux français, mais aussi à redéfinir les objectifs de la pension de réversion, cette dernière répondant aujourd’hui à des logiques différentes selon les régimes de retraite. Le mélange actuel de logiques patrimoniales, assurantielles et d’aides sociales se traduit par de nombreuses disparités entre personnes veuves selon le régime d’affiliation du conjoint décédé. Cet article présente les disparités existantes dans le système de réversion. Il propose des pistes pour une réforme des pensions de réversion et, en particulier, celle répondant à un objectif de maintien du niveau de vie du conjoint survivant. En utilisant des données de pension de retraite de couple (Fidéli 2016), nous mettons en évidence les redistributions engendrées par le passage à un système de réversion de ce type, selon le niveau des pensions de droits directs des femmes et celles des couples. Les femmes aux pensions les plus faibles, quel que soit leur régime réversataire, ainsi que celles à fort niveau de pension, lorsqu’elles sont veuves d’un ancien salarié du privé, auraient un taux de réversion dans un système de réversion maintenant le niveau de vie supérieur à celui du système actuel. À l’échelle du couple, les veuves d’un salarié du secteur privé appartenant aux couples dont les pensions sont les plus élevées gagneraient à la mise en place d’un dispositif de maintien du niveau de vie, au détriment d’une perte, de moindre ampleur, pour celles issues des autres couples. L’effet serait opposé pour les veuves d’un ancien fonctionnaire.

Cet article présente brièvement la méthodologie des comptes nationaux distributifs, qui ventile le revenu national total et le patrimoine total entre résidents. Ces comptes permettent d’estimer des statistiques d’inégalité et de croissance par catégorie de revenu et niveau de patrimoine cohérentes avec la croissance agrégée des comptes nationaux. Cette méthodologie a récemment été appliquée à plusieurs pays et les données produites sont disponibles dans WID.world, base de données sur les inégalités mondiales. L’article résume les premières conclusions empiriques. Au cours des dernières décennies, nous observons dans la quasi-­totalité des pays une hausse de la part du revenu et du patrimoine détenue par les plus riches, mais l’ampleur de cette hausse varie fortement, ce qui suggère que les institutions et politiques des différents pays jouent un rôle. Nous combinons les statistiques nationales pour estimer les inégalités mondiales depuis 1980. Malgré le rattrapage de grands pays émergents comme la Chine et l’Inde, les inégalités mondiales ont augmenté depuis 1980. Cette évolution s’explique par la croissance des revenus des personnes les mieux payées au niveau mondial.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThis work was done in the context of a research partnership between theInstitutdes politiques publiquesand theDirection de l’Animation de la Recherche, des Etudeset des Statistiques(Dares) at the French Ministry of Labor. We thank the Dares forits financial support that made it possible to realise this study.Our partners at the Dares have also provided several suggestions that dramat-ically improved the quality of the report. We would like to thank in particular fortheir useful feedback Cécile Ballini, Mathilde Gaini and Philippe Zamora. We alsothank them warmly for their patience and flexibility throughout the project.We then thank warmly the IPP team for constant support with the project. Weare particularly grateful to Julien Grenet as he suggested the central idea that isinvestigated in Chapter 4 of this report, and provided insightful comments through-out the project. Marion Monnet also deserves to be thanked for participating in themanagement of the project at its initial stage, and helping throughout.This report was written after the organization by the Dares and the IPP of aworking group on skills and skill mismatch. We would like to thank all participantsand their institutions for their feedback when we presented preliminary versionsof our work to the group. We also thank the OECD which allowed us to access aslightly enriched version of the PIAAC data, which was very useful to undertake theanalyses presented in the report.

BACKGROUND: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, teleconsultation were seldom used in France. The sanitary crisis has brought with it a great need for the use of teleconsultation and other interventions using digital technology. OBJECTIVE: Indentify how has French teleconsultation for obstetrics and gynecology care services been used prior and during this sanitary crisis. METHODS: We first described the global picture of the teleconsultation context prior to the sanitary crisis and then during the first quarantine and lockdown measures. We set up three aspects, namely: 1-use of teleconsultation as regards to providers’ ability; 2- use of teleconsultation as regards to technology features; 3- use of teleconsultation for which type of healthcare. Second, we studied the determinant factors of teleconsultation use and those of provider’s satisfaction with teleconsultation practice. RESULTS: We show the central role of training, the importance of some main digital technology benefits including improving public health, responding to patient’s request and facilitating healthcare access, as well as the importance of some main digital technology drawbacks including lack of convenience and lack of veracity (truthfulness). CONCLUSIONS: Our results guide the regulator on the suppliers’ motivation and needs for teleconsultation adoption. They highlight the conditions for an efficient use of teleconsultation.

We propose novel approaches to estimating student preferences with data from matching mechanisms, especially the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance. Even if the mechanism is strategy-proof, assuming that students truthfully rank schools in applications may be restrictive. We show that when students are ranked strictly by some ex-ante known priority index (e.g., test scores), stability is a plausible and weaker assumption, implying that every student is matched with her favorite school/college among those she qualifies for ex post. The methods are illustrated in simulations and applied to school choice in Paris. We discuss when each approach is more appropriate in real-life settings.

L’évasion fiscale est un sujet qui se dérobe aux outils de l’analyse économique traditionnelle. D’une part, comme toute activité illégale, l’évasion fiscale échappe à l’observation du chercheur en même temps qu’elle se dissimule aux autorités : l’analyse empirique de son ampleur, de ses déterminants et de la manière dont différents dispositifs l’affectent est nécessairement très limitée. D’autre part, sur le plan théorique, l’application simple du calcul coût-bénéfice auquel est supposé se livrer le contribuable « rationnel » conduit à un paradoxe : contrairement à une idée largement répandue, les bénéfices de l’évasion fiscale sont tellement élevés, et le risque de sanction est tellement faible, que l’on peut s’étonner qu’elle soit aussi peu pratiquée dans l’ensemble des économies développées. Plutôt que l’évasion fiscale, c’est donc la « soumission fiscale » qui en constitue le pendant, la disposition à payer l’impôt, qu’il convient d’expliquer pour en comprendre les déterminants. Le double défi que posent les décisions d’évasion fiscale à l’analyse économique n’a pu être relevé que très récemment, grâce à l’émergence, au cours des vingt dernières années, d’une nouvelle approche, l’économie comportementale, qui s’appuie sur la psychologie pour mieux comprendre les comportements économiques ; et, conjointement, d’une nouvelle méthode, l’économie expérimentale, qui permet d’étudier empiriquement les comportements économiques sur lesquels il est difficile de collecter des données convaincantes. Cet opuscule rend compte des résultats de ces travaux et présente un panorama des outils de politique fiscale qui s’en dégagent.

We here consider the link between individual financial profiles over time and well-being, as measured by life satisfaction. We in particular look at annual self-reported financial worsening and improvement information for over 25,000 individuals in Australian panel data from 2002 to 2017. We first find that satisfaction falls (rises) with a contemporaneous major financial worsening (improvement), with worsening having the larger influence. Second, the experience of these financial events in the past continues to be linked to current well-being. Last, only the order of financial-improvement spells relates to well-being: a given number of past years where finances deteriorated has the same association with current well-being whether the deterioration occurred in one continuous spell or was interrupted. We last show that these associations are heterogeneous over the distribution of well-being.

We investigate the difference in homeownership rates between natives and first-generation immigrants in France, and how this difference evolves over the 1975–1999 period, by using a large longitudinal dataset. We find that the homeownership gap is large and has remained steady. Entries into the territory have a large negative effect on the evolution of homeownership rates for immigrants. Although entrants have on average better education than people staying in the territory for the entire period (i.e. stayers), they are younger and thus at an earlier stage in the wealth accumulation process. They are also located in large cities, where the homeownership rate is lower, and the returns to their characteristics are lower than those for stayers. Leavers have a positive effect on the evolution of homeownership rates for immigrants because they have a low access to homeownership and they exit the country. But this effect is only one-fifth that of entrants. For stayers, we show that returns to characteristics change in favor of immigrants, which is consistent with assimilation theories. However, among stayers who access homeownership, immigrants end up in owned dwellings that are of lesser quality than natives.

Job insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labour market. We here argue that it reduces fertility amongst the employed. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by large private firms when they laid off workers aged over 50, produced an exogenous rise in job insecurity for younger workers in these firms. A difference-in-differences analysis of French ECHP data reveals that this greater job insecurity for these under-50s significantly reduced their probability of having a new child by 3.9 percentage points. Reduced fertility is only found at the intensive margin: job insecurity reduces family size but not the probability of parenthood itself. Our results also suggest negative selection into parenthood, as this fertility effect does not appear for low-income and less-educated workers.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of the Danish seine which was introduced for a subsample of vessels on a single wholesale fish market in France. The goal was to mitigate the decrease in vessel profits due to the rise of gasoline prices. Estimations are conducted from transaction data over the 2009–2011 period during which the innovation was introduced. Using a difference-in-differences approach around the discontinuity, we find that the innovation has a large positive effect on quality, prices and profit of treated vessels. However, a shift in caught fish species is observed and new targeted species are fished very intensively. This suggests that quota management is needed to ensure the sustainability of fishing practices involving the new technology in the long run.

Using two earned income/tax declaration experimental designs we show that only partial liars are affected by a truth-telling oath, a non-price commitment device. Under oath, we see no change in the number of chronic liars and fewer partial liars. Rather than smoothly increasing their compliance, we also observe that partial liars who respond to the oath, respond by becoming fully honest under oath. Based on both response times data and the consistency of subjects when several compliance decisions are made in a row, we show that partial lying arises as the result of weak preferences towards profitable honesty. The oath only transforms people with weak preferences for lying into being committed to the truth.

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.

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

Over the 1967-2015 period, net wage inequality has decreased in France by 25%, in contrast to the significant increase experienced by most developed countries. Less well known is the fact that labor cost inequality has actually increased by 8% over the same period. We show that, (a) standard demand-side explanations for the rise in inequality apply in France when tested using measures of labor cost (as they should be); (b) reforms to payroll taxation, jointly with increases in the minimum wage, can explain a large part of the decrease in net wage inequality, in the context of increasing market inequality.

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.

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

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasising the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations of their life. We then turn to practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to know more about and where the ideological barriers lay.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread school shutdowns, and many schools have opted for education using online learning platforms. Using administrative data from three middle schools in China, this paper estimates the causal effects of online learning on student performance. Using the difference-in-differences approach, we show that online education improves students’ academic achievement by 0.22 of a standard deviation, relative to those who stopped receiving learning support from their school during the COVID-19 lockdown. All else equal, students from a school having access to recorded online lessons delivered by external higher-quality teachers have achieved more progress in academic outcomes than those accessing lessons recorded by teachers in their own school. We find no evidence that the educational benefits of distance learning differ for rural and urban students. However, there is more progress in the academic achievement of students using a computer for online education than that of those using a smartphone. Last, low achievers benefit the most from online learning while there is no significant impact for top students. Our findings have important policy implications for educational practices when lockdown measures are implemented during a pandemic.

Causal effects of a policy change on hazard rates of a duration outcome variable are not identified from a comparison of spells before and after the policy change if there is unobserved heterogeneity in the effects and no model structure is imposed. We develop a discontinuity approach that overcomes this by considering spells that include the moment of the policy change and by exploiting variation in the moment at which different cohorts are exposed to the policy change. We prove identification of average treatment effects on hazard rates without model structure. We estimate these effects by kernel hazard regression. We use the introduction of the NDYP program for young unemployed individuals in the UK to estimate average program participation effects on the exit rate to work as well as anticipation effects.

Job insecurity is one type of risk that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it. We consider marriage as potential insurance against labour-market risk. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande layoff tax for older workers produced an exogenous rise in job insecurity for younger workers. A difference-in-differences estimation in panel data reveals that this greater job insecurity for the under-50s led to a significant rise in their probability of marriage, and especially with partners who had greater job security, consistent with marriage providing insurance on the labour market.

Every day, policy makers must decide whether a policy is desirable. They do so by examining its impact on a range of outcomes. But the problem is how to aggregate these disparate outcomes. For example, as covid-19 cases rise again, some lockdown measures are gradually being reintroduced across the UK. These policy choices will lead to outcomes that are good (such as fewer deaths from covid-19, less commuting, better air quality) and some that are bad (unemployment, income losses, loneliness, domestic abuse). How can policy makers aggregate these disparate effects in order to arrive at an overall assessment? To do so requires a “common currency” with which to measure all the effects. The currency we propose is the change in years of human wellbeing resulting from the policy.

Si l’on m’avait dit en 1990 que je publierais en 2020 un recueil de chroniques intitulé » Vivement le socialisme ! « , j’aurais cru à une mauvaise blague. Du haut de mes dix-huit ans, je venais de passer l’automne 1989 à écouter à la radio l’effondrement des dictatures communistes et du » socialisme réel » en Europe de l’Est. Seulement voilà : trente ans plus tard, en 2020, l’hyper-capitalisme a été beaucoup trop loin, et je suis maintenant convaincu qu’il nous faut réfléchir à un nouveau dépassement du capitalisme, une nouvelle forme de socialisme, participatif et décentralisé, fédéral et démocratique, écologique, métissé et féministe. L’histoire décidera si le mot » socialisme » est définitivement mort et doit être remplacé. Je pense pour ma part qu’il peut être sauvé, et même qu’il reste le terme le plus adapté pour désigner l’idée d’un système économique alternatif au capitalisme. En tout état de cause, on ne peut pas se contenter d’être » contre » le capitalisme ou le néo-libéralisme : il faut aussi et surtout être » pour » autre chose, ce qui exige de désigner précisément le système économique idéal que l’on souhaite mettre en place, la société juste que l’on a en tête, quel que soit le nom que l’on décide finalement de lui donner. Il est devenu commun de dire que le système capitaliste actuel n’a pas d’avenir, tant il creuse les inégalités et épuise la planète. Ce n’est pas faux, sauf qu’en l’absence d’alternative clairement explicitée, le système actuel a encore de longs jours devant lui.

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.

This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID.world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades, but the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners.

This paper investigates the impact of delaying retirement on mortality among the French population. We take advantage of the 1993 pension reform in the private sector to identify the causal effect of an increase in claiming age on mortality. We use administrative data which provide detailed information on career characteristics, dates of birth and death. Our results, precisely estimated, show that an exogenous increase of one year in the claiming age has no significant impact on the probability to die. To test the power of our sample to detect statistically significant effects for rare events like death, we compute minimum detectable effects (MDE). Our MDE estimates suggest that, if an impact of later retirement on mortality would be detectable, it would remain very small in magnitude.

The so-called “gender-equality paradox” is the fact that gender segregation across occupations is more pronounced in more egalitarian and more developed countries. Some scholars have explained this paradox by the existence of deeply rooted or intrinsic gender differences in preferences that materialize more easily in countries where economic constraints are more limited. In line with a strand of research in sociology, we show instead that it can be explained by cross-country differences in essentialist gender norms regarding math aptitudes and appropriate occupational choices. To this aim, we propose a measure of the prevalence and extent of internalization of the stereotype that “math is not for girls” at the country level. This is done using individual-level data on the math attitudes of 300,000 15-y-old female and male students in 64 countries. The stereotype associating math to men is stronger in more egalitarian and developed countries. It is also strongly associated with various measures of female underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and can therefore entirely explain the gender-equality paradox. We suggest that economic development and gender equality in rights go hand-in-hand with a reshaping rather than a suppression of gender norms, with the emergence of new and more horizontal forms of social differentiation across genders.

Following the example of the United States, most European countries reformed their hospital regulations in the early 2000s, with the introduction of a new payment system aimed at encouraging efficiency in care delivery. Because they put strong pressure on hospitals to lower their costs, wide implementation of these reforms raised concerns for some about quality of care. One solution has been to encourage quality competition among hospitals. The purpose of this volume is to bring together relevant theoretical and empirical results regarding the impact of hospital competition on the quality of care. Contributions come from academic economists recognized as the best specialists of the topic worldwide. They address the following questions: Does more intense competition among hospitals operating under fixed price systems always result in improved quality of care? Do hospital objectives and/or ownership matter? Is the impact identical for different diseases? Is it appropriate to introduce competition among hospitals with different mandates?

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

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

The statistical analysis of cross-section data very often reveals a U-shaped relationship between subjective well-being and age. This paper uses 18 waves of British panel data to try to distinguish between two potential explanations of this shape: a pure life-cycle or aging effect, and a fixed cohort effect depending on year of birth. Panel analysis controlling for fixed effects continues to produce a U-shaped relationship between well-being and age, although this U-shape is flatter for life satisfaction than for the GHQ measure of mental well-being. The pattern of the estimated cohort effects also differs between the two well-being measures and, to an extent, by demographic group. In particular, those born earlier report more positive GHQ scores, controlling for their current age; this phenomenon is especially prevalent for women.

We here consider the relationship between the individual time profile of crime victimisation and sleep quality. Sleep quality worsens with contemporaneous crime victimisation, with physical violence having a larger effect than property crime. But crime history also matters, and past victimisation experience continues to reduce current sleep quality. Last, there is some evidence that the order of victimisation spells plays a role: consecutive years of crime victimisation affect sleep quality more adversely than the same number of years when not contiguous.

A model of labour supply and taxation is developed in which observed hours reflect both the distribution of preferences and restrictions on choices. Hours restrictions are placed in a constrained rational choice setting in which the set of alternative hours on offer is restricted. Choices are made on a random subset of possible hours. We focus on the case where the choice set contains at most two offers. We show that when the choice set distribution is known, preferences can be identified. Conversely we show that, where preferences are known, the choice set distribution can be fully recovered. Conditions for identification of both preferences and the distribution of choice sets are also developed. We illustrate this approach in a labour supply setting with nonlinear budget constraints. Heterogeneity in the budget constraint reveals properties of the choice set. This framework is used to study the labour supply behaviour of a large sample of working age mothers in the UK, accounting for nonlinearities in the tax and welfare benefit system, fixed costs of work and restrictions on hours choices.

We propose novel approaches to estimating student preferences with data from matching mechanisms, especially the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance. Even if the mechanism is strategy-proof, assuming that students truthfully rank schools in applications may be restrictive. We show that when students are ranked strictly by some ex ante known priority index (e.g., test scores), stability is a plausible and weaker assumption, implying that every student is matched with her favorite school/college among those she qualifies for ex post. The methods are illustrated in simulations and applied to school choice in Paris. We discuss when each approach is more appropriate in real-life settings.

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

Oath-taking for senior executives has been promoted as a mean to enhance honesty within and towards organizations. Herein we explore whether people who voluntarily sign a solemn truth-telling oath are more committed to sincere behavior when offered the chance to lie. We design an experiment to test how the oath affects truth-telling in two contexts: a neutral context replicating the typical experiment in the literature, and a « loaded » context in which we remind subjects that « a lie is a lie. » We consider four payoff configurations, with differential monetary incentives to lie, implemented as within-subjects treatment variables. The results are reinforced by robustness investigations in which each subject made only one lying decision. Our results show that the oath reduces lying, especially in the loaded environment-falsehoods are reduced by fifty percent. The oath, however, have a weaker effect on lying in the neutral environment. The oath did affect decision times in all instances: the average person takes significantly more time deciding whether to lie under oath.

We use the 2015–16 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society) to look at subjective wellbeing around the time of the June 2016 EU membership Referendum in the UK (Brexit). We employ measures of both evaluative and affective wellbeing, namely life satisfaction and mental distress, respectively. We find that those reporting lower life satisfaction in 2015 were more likely to express a preference for leaving the EU in 2016, while mental distress was less predictive of pro‐Brexit attitudes. Post‐Referendum, those with Leave preferences enjoyed an increase in life satisfaction but there was no change in average life satisfaction in the overall sample. In contrast, the average level of mental distress increased in the sample post‐ Referendum, with no significant difference between those preferring to remain in or to leave the EU. We test the robustness of our results by considering a number of potential caveats, such as sample selection, unobserved individual fixed effects and the interval between interviews. Overall, our results suggest that levels of subjective wellbeing may be both a cause and a result of the 2016 Brexit vote.

Toutes les sociétés humaines ont besoin de justifier leurs inégalités : il faut leur trouver des raisons, faute de quoi c’est l’ensemble de l’édifice politique et social qui menace de s’effondrer. Les idéologies du passé, si on les étudie de près, ne sont à cet égard pas toujours plus folles que celles du présent. C’est en montrant la multiplicité des trajectoires et des bifurcations possibles que l’on peut interroger les fondements de nos propres institutions et envisager les conditions de leur transformation.À partir de données comparatives d’une ampleur et d’une profondeur inédites, ce livre retrace dans une perspective tout à la fois économique, sociale, intellectuelle et politique l’histoire et le devenir des régimes inégalitaires, depuis les sociétés trifonctionnelles et esclavagistes anciennes jusqu’aux sociétés postcoloniales et hypercapitalistes modernes, en passant par les sociétés propriétaristes, coloniales, communistes et sociales-démocrates. À l’encontre du récit hyperinégalitaire qui s’est imposé depuis les années 1980-1990, il montre que c’est le combat pour l’égalité et l’éducation, et non pas la sacralisation de la propriété, qui a permis le développement économique et le progrès humain.En s’appuyant sur les leçons de l’histoire globale, il est possible de rompre avec le fatalisme qui nourrit les dérives identitaires actuelles et d’imaginer un socialisme participatif pour le XXIe siècle : un nouvel horizon égalitaire à visée universelle, une nouvelle idéologie de l’égalité, de la propriété sociale, de l’éducation et du partage des savoirs et des pouvoirs.

There is ongoing debate about the effect of ownership on hospital performance as regards efficiency and care quality. This paper proposes an analysis of the differences in productivity and efficiency between French public and private hospitals. In France, public and private hospitals do not only differ in their objectives. They are also subject to different rules as regards investments and human resources management. In addition, they were financed according to different payment schemes until 2004: a global budget system was used for public hospitals, while private hospitals were paid on a fee-for-service basis. Since 2004, a prospective payment system (PPS) with fixed payment per stay in a given DRG is gradually introduced for both private and public hospitals. Payments generally differ for the same DRG, depending on whether the stay occurred in a private or public hospital. A convergence of payments between the nonprofit and for profit sectors was planned by 2018 by the previous government, but this project has been abandoned by the newly elected government. Pursuing such a convergence comes down to suppose that there are differences in efficiency between private and public hospitals, which would be reduced by the introduction of competition between these two sectors. The purpose of this paper is to compare the productivity of public and private hospitals in France. We try to assess the respective impacts, on productivity differences, of differences in efficiency, patient characteristics and production composition. We have chosen to estimate a production function. For that purpose, we have defined a variable measuring the volume of care services provided by each hospital, synthetizing the hospital multiproduct activity into one homogenous output. Our data comes from two administrative sources which record exhaustive information about French hospitals. Matching these two database provides us an original source of information, at the hospital-year level, about both the production composition (number of stays in each DRG), and production factors (number of beds, facilities, number of doctors, nurses, of administrative and support staff, etc.). We observe 1,604 hospitals over the period 1998-2003, of which 642 hospitals are public, 126 are private not-for-profit and 836 are private-for-profit. This database is relative to acute care and covers more than 95 % of French hospitals. We use a stochastic production frontier approach combined with hospitals fixed effects. We find that the lower productivity of public hospitals is not explained by inefficiency (distance to the frontier), but oversized establishments, patient characteristics and production characteristics (small proportion of surgical stays). Once patient and production characteristics are taken into account, large and medium sized public hospitals appear to be more efficient than private hospitals. As a result, payment convergence would provide incentives for public hospitals to change the composition of their supply for care.

Gender differences in math performance are now small in developed countries and they cannot explain on their own the strong under-representation of women in math-related fields. This latter result is however no longer true once gender differences in reading performance are also taken into account. Using individual-level data on 300,000 15-year-old students in 64 countries, we show that the difference between a student performance in reading and math is 80% of a standard deviation larger for girls than boys, a magnitude considered as very large. When this difference is controlled for, the gender gap in students’ intentions to pursue math-intensive studies and careers is reduced by around 75%, while gender gaps in self-concept in math, declared interest for math or attitudes towards math entirely disappear. These latter variables are also much less able to explain the gender gap in intentions to study math than is students’ difference in performance between math and reading. These results are in line with choice models in which educational decisions involve intra-individual comparisons of achievement and self-beliefs in different subjects as well as cultural norms regarding gender. To directly show that intra-individual comparisons of achievement impact students’ intended careers, we use differences across schools in teaching resources dedicated to math and reading as exogenous variations of students comparative advantage for math. Results confirm that the comparative advantage in math with respect to reading at the time of making educational choices plays a key role in the process leading to women’s under-representation in math-intensive fields.

Page de couverture. Le Grand Paris Express est un projet de très grande ampleur qui soulève nombre de discussions restées trop souvent très superficielles. Ce livre présente les différentes recherches économiques effectuées depuis une dizaine d’années pour mieux en appréhender les conséquences sur la mobilité, l’activité économique et l’organisation urbaine. Ces recherches, encore méconnues, se situent à la pointe de la connaissance actuelle sur le sujet, et illustrent l’importance de bien décrire et évaluer les effets des infrastructures de transports, surtout lorsqu’elles sont de taille aussi exceptionnelle que le Grand Paris Express, pour que la puissance publique puisse prendre ses décisions sur la base des informations les plus robustes. Tous les aspects utiles sont abordés, l’impact sur la mobilité et les grandes difficultés qu’ont les modèles de prévision classiques pour appréhender les conséquences de la mise en service d’une infrastructure performante telle que le Grand Paris Express, les effets de cet investissement sur l’emploi et sa croissance comme sur la transformation dans les tendances de la localisation des entreprises et des populations et ses conséquences en termes de productivité des entreprises et des services publics, le management des mégaprojets, dimension essentielle de leur réussite, ainsi que la comparaison avec le projet du Crossrail de Londres. Ce livre entend nourrir un débat fructueux et ouvert sur l’organisation de l’espace économique des villes et le rôle moteur des grandes infrastructures, à un niveau dépassant les jugements simplistes que malheureusement on rencontre encore trop souvent.

A partir d’un ensemble de données fiscales sur longue période, de 2005 à 2015, ce rapport documente le taux de taxation des bénéfices en France. Les taux implicites moyens des bénéfices parmi les sociétés non-financières ont été relativement stables sur l’ensemble de la période étudiée, passant de 19 % en 2005 à 21 % en 2015. Les grandes entreprises bénéficient de taux effectifs plus faibles que les autres entreprises. Ainsi, en 2015 le taux implicite moyen des grandes entreprises est de 17,8 % contre 23,7 % pour les PME. On constate néanmoins une certaine convergence du taux implicite de taxation des grande entreprises par rapport aux autres entreprises. Ainsi, le taux implicite moyen des grandes entreprises a augmenté, passant de 10 % à 17,8 %, quand le taux implicite moyen des PME a légèrement baissé, passant de 27,7 % à 23,7 %. La baisse du rôle de la déductibilité des charges financières explique cette convergence. Le rapport analyse enfin la dispersion des taux d’imposition. Alors qu’elles sont l’objet d’une attention soutenue, les différences entre catégories de taille d’entreprise ou entre secteurs ne capturent qu’une part minime de la variance des taux implicites au cours de la période. L’hétérogénéité entre entreprises est persistante au cours du temps et ne reflète pas des situations transitoires.

Le Crédit d’impôt recherche (CIR) est aujourd’hui le principal dispositif de soutien public à l’investissement en recherche et développement en France. Au vu de l’enjeu, à la fois pour les finances publiques et pour le potentiel de croissance, l’évaluation rigoureuse des politiques publiques de soutien à l’innovation est essentielle.Ce rapport contribue à ces évaluations, encore peu développées, en exploitant de nombreuses sources de données: données fiscales sur les entreprises, sur le crédit d’impôt recherche, sur les aides directes à l’innovation de Bpifrance, ainsi que l’enquête R&D du Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche et les données PATSTAT de l’Office européen des brevets. L’appariement de ces données met en lumière la segmentation des dispositifs sur des populations d’entreprises aux caractéristiques différentes, mais aussi l’enjeu d’un non-recours élevé à ces dispositifs de soutien à l’innovation.Notre stratégie d’identification préférée repose sur la comparaison d’entreprises qui avaient recours au CIR avant la réforme de 2008 et d’entreprises qui n’ont jamais eu recours au CIR pendant la période d’analyse (2004-2011). Sous l’hypothèse qu’en l’absence de la réforme, l’évolution des dépenses de R&D de ces deux groupes d’entreprises aurait été parallèle, nous obtenons des effets positifs de la réforme sur les dépenses de R&D de l’ordre de 15 % à 18 % impliquant un multiplicateur du crédit d’impôt de 1,3 à 1,5 – c’est-à-dire un effet d’un euro de CIR entraînant de 1,3 à 1,5 euros de dépenses R&D supplémentaires – mais avec un intervalle de confiance qui n’exclut pas que l’effet soit inférieur à 1.L’effet sur les dépôts de brevet met en évidence un effet positif et significatif de l’ordre de 5 % sur la probabilité de déposer un brevet, mais aucun effet sur le nombre de brevets déposés conditionnellement au fait d’avoir déposé un brevet sur la période d’analyse avant réforme. Cet effet de la réforme 2008 sur une mesure de l’innovation permet d’émettre un jugement globalement positif, mais nuancé, avec un effet particulièrement limité au regard de l’effort en termes de finances publiques.

This paper investigates the importance of ethnic homophily in the hiring discrimination process. Our evidence comes from a correspondence test performed in France in which we use three different kinds of ethnic identification: French sounding names, North African sounding names, and « foreign » sounding names with no clear ethnic association. Within the groups of men and women, we show that all non-French applicants are equally discriminated against when compared to French applicants. Moreover, we find direct evidence of ethnic homophily: recruiters with European names are more likely to call back French named applicants. These results show the importance of favoritism for in-group members. To test for the effect of information about applicant’s skills, we also add a signal related to language ability in all resumes sent to half the job offers. The design allows to uniquely identify the effect of the language signal by gender. Although the signal inclusion significantly reduces the discrimination against non-French females, it is much weaker for male minorities.

We here consider the relationship between the individual time profile of crime victimisation and sleep quality. Sleep quality worsens with contemporaneous crime victimisation, with physical violence having a larger effect than property crime. But crime history also matters, and past victimisation experience continues to reduce current sleep quality. Last, there is some evidence that the order of victimisation spells plays a role: consecutive years of crime victimisation affect sleep quality more adversely than the same number of years when not contiguous.

This paper develops a simplified methodology to distribute total national income across income groups that reproduces closely the sophisticated methodology of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018). It starts from top income share series based on fiscal income of Piketty and Saez (2003) and makes two basic assumptions on how national income components not included in fiscal income are distributed: (1) nontaxable labor income and capital income from pension funds are distributed like taxable labor income; (2) other nontaxable capital income is distributed like taxable capital income. This methodology could be applied to countries with less data.

We here use five rounds of Afrobarometer data covering more than 100,000 individuals over the 2004–2016 period to explore the link between individual self‐reported measures of living conditions and access to four basic needs. We not only consider own access to these needs, but also various indices of their deprivation, satisfaction and inequality. We find some evidence of comparisons to those who are better off and to those who are worse off, in terms of access to basic needs, in the evaluation of current living conditions. Overall, however, subjective living conditions are mostly absolute in African countries. There is notable heterogeneity by level of development, with the effect of lack of access to basic needs being more pronounced in poorer countries. Equally, comparisons to the better off are associated with better living conditions in poorer countries, suggesting the existence of a tunnel effect: this latter disappears with economic development.

Le rapport analyse les droits conjugaux dans le système de retraite français en confrontant les effets des dispositifs avec les objectifs qui leur sont attribués. Plusieurs pistes de réforme, compatibles avec un système de retraite universel en points et visant à améliorer l’efficacité de ces dispositifs, sont présentées. Les droits conjugaux dans le système français sont l’ensemble des droits dits dérivés, au sens où ils dépendent des droits directs d’un conjoint. Ces droits dérivés, ou pensions de réversion, avaient pour objectif de couvrir le risque veuvage. Ce risque peut être défini comme la baisse du niveau de vie suite au décès du conjoint, ou bien l’entrée en pauvreté suite au veuvage. Dans le système actuel, la réversion maintient, en moyenne, le niveau de vie au décès du conjoint. Cependant, cette moyenne cache de fortes disparités avec des effets de surcompensation et des pertes nettes de niveau de vie – notamment quand le conjoint survivant a une faible ou pas de pension de droit propre. Ces disparités proviennent des différences entre régimes de mode de calcul des pensions de réversion, dont l’origine tient à la fois à des philosophies différentes et à l’usage de la réversion pour des objectifs variés. L’augmentation des séparations a conduit à définir un nouveau risque à couvrir : le risque divorce. Dans la situation actuelle, c’est la réversion qui joue ce rôle. En cas de divorce, le montant de la pension de réversion dépend du parcours conjugal postérieur du conjoint décédé. De plus, la pension de réversion ne peut être versée qu’au décès du conjoint, potentiellement de nombreuses années après le divorce, participant à diminuer le taux de recours. La réversion apparaît donc comme un instrument inadapté à la couverture du risque divorce. Actuellement, tous les régimes de retraite limitent le bénéfice des pensions de réversion aux couples mariés, excluant ainsi les couples pacsés. Il est n’est pas toujours facile de justifier une telle différenciation, qui est, par ailleurs, mal connue des assurés. Les règles actuelles définissant les pensions de réversion sont très hétérogènes selon les régimes, différant sur l’âge d’ouverture des droits, la condition de durée de mariage, les règles de partage des droits entre conjoints survivants divorcés, la prise en compte ou non d’autres ressources, et le taux de pension de réversion. De telles disparités sont difficile à justifier, et l’unification des règles devrait être un objectif de la mise en place d’un système universel de retraite.

Cette étude vise à simuler un système de retraite fonctionnant en points, dans l’optique de la réforme en préparation visant à l’instauration d’un régime universel en points. L’objectif de ce rapport est de se concentrer sur la définition des règles de pilotage du système. En particulier, quelles sont les règles d’or du système qui devraient faire l’objet d’engagements forts de la part du législateur pour garantir les droits de retraite ? Dans quelle mesure une partie du pilotage peut faire l’objet de décisions plus flexibles, au fil de l’eau ? La méthodologie de ce travail repose sur une analyse théorique et la simulation de chocs démographiques et économiques afin d’étudier les conséquences pour la soutenabilité du système et le niveau des pensions, de différentes règles de pilotage. Il s’agit de soumettre le système de retraite à des stress test, à l’instar des tests de résistance bancaire simulés par les banques centrales.

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.

Why do people pay taxes? Rational choice theory has fallen short in answering this question. Another explanation, called “tax morale”, has been promoted. Tax morale captures the behavioral idea that non-monetary preferences (like norm-submission, moral emotions and moral judgments) might be better determinants of tax compliance than monetary trade-offs. Herein we report on two lab experiments designed to assess whether norm-submission, moral emotions (e.g. affective empathy, cognitive empathy, propensity to feel guilt and shame) or moral judgments (e.g. ethics principles, integrity, and moralization of everyday life) can help explain compliance behavior. Although we find statistically significant correlations of tax compliance behavior with empathy and shame, the economic significance of these correlations are low–—more than 80% of the variability in compliance remains unexplained. These results suggest that tax authorities should focus on the institutional context, rather than individual preference characteristics, to handle tax evasion.

This paper investigates whether interracial contact in childhood impacts adult romantic relationships. We exploit quasi-random variation in the share of black students across cohorts within US schools. We find that more black peers of the same gender lead whites to have more relationships with blacks as adults. While we do not find impacts on labor market outcomes, there are significant effects on reported racial attitudes. Furthermore, an increase in meeting opportunities is unlikely to explain the increased interracial relationships, since the effect is persistent across time, space, and social networks. Overall, interracial contact during childhood has important long-term behavioral consequences.

We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French house and land price data. After handling a number of estimation concerns, we find that the elasticity of urban costs increases with city population with an estimate of about 0.03 for an urban area with 100,000 inhabitants to 0.08 for an urban area of the size of Paris. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent interest such as the share of housing in expenditure, the elasticity of unit house and land prices with respect to city population, and within-city distance gradients for house and land prices.

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

We combine national accounts, surveys, and new tax data to study the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China from 1978 to 2015. The national wealth-income ratio increased from 350 percent in 1978 to 700 percent in 2015, while the share of public property in national wealth declined from 70 percent to 30 percent. We provide sharp upward revision of official inequality estimates. The top 10 percent income share rose from 27 percent to 41 percent between 1978 and 2015; the bottom 50 percent share dropped from 27 percent to 15 percent. China’s inequality levels used to be close to Nordic countries and are now approaching US levels.

Ce Précis propose un panorama des méthodes expérimentales utilisées en sciences économiques. Ces méthodes ont été développées afin d’observer les comportements adoptés par les « agents économiques » dans des situations qui répliquent celles auxquelles s’intéresse l’économiste ; mais dans un environnement contrôlé. Sur cette base, les outils présentés dans ce précis permettent de tester les prédictions et le contenu empirique de la théorie économique, de faire émerger de nouveaux faits stylisés sur le fonctionnement de situations mal comprises par la théorie, ou encore d’informer l’élaboration des politiques publiques. Cette large palette d’objectifs explique que ces méthodes soient devenues très courantes en économie appliquée, et que leur usage se soit diffusé au-delà de l’économie à des domaines tels que le marketing, la gestion ou encore le management. L’ouvrage présente un traitement détaillé des principaux outils disponibles pour mesurer différents aspects des comportements économiques : les décisions individuelles dans le certain et dans l’incertain, les choix intertemporels, les interactions stratégiques, les préférences sociales et les mécanismes d’allocation de ressources. L’ouvrage présente également les critères méthodologiques qui permettent d’évaluer la pertinence théorique et empirique des données récoltées à partir de ces outils.

Le modèle TAXIPP est le modèle de microsimulation socio-fiscal développé au sein de l’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP). Cet outil vise à simuler les prélèvements obligatoires et transferts monétaires du système redistributif français. Ce document méthodologique présente la version 1.0 du modèle et fait suite aux guides des versions antérieures TAXIPP 0.0 à TAXIPP 0.3. Il décrit le fonctionnement du modèle dans le détail, à savoir les données utilisées, la structure du simulateur ainsi que l’ensemble des choix méthodologiques opérés. La version 1.0 représente un changement important tant dans les sources de données utilisées que dans l’architecture. D’une part, cette version repose sur un appariement statistique entre données administratives et données d’enquête, l’idée étant d’utiliser des sources administratives autant que possible. D’autre part, TAXIPP 1.0 repose désormais sur l’utilisation du calculateur socio-fiscal opensource OpenFisca, co-développé par l’IPP au sein d’une large communauté.

Cette étude a été commanditée par la commission des finances du Sénat afin d’apporter un éclairage sur les impacts de la mise en place du prélèvement forfaitaire unique (PFU) en 2018. L’objectif de l’étude est de présenter les premiers résultats de l’impact du PFU – à l’aide des quelques sources de données déjà disponibles – et de présenter une évaluation plus complète de la réforme de 2013 ayant supprimé le prélèvement forfaitaire libératoire (PFL). Une attention particulière est donnée à l’évaluation d’impact de la fiscalité sur les revenus du capital sur la distribution de dividendes, sur les possibles effets d’optimisation ou de déplacement des revenus, ainsi que sur les effets économiques réels sur l’investissement.

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention in social, academic and policy cir- cles. However, there is no consensus as to its precise de_nition. Intuitively, economic insecurity is multi-faceted, making any comprehensive formal de_nition that subsumes all possible aspects extremely challenging. We propose a simpli_ed approach, and character- ize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures that are based on the time pro_le of economic resources. We then apply our economic-insecurity measure to data on political preferences. In US, UK and German panel data, and conditional on current economic resources, economic insecurity is associated with both greater political participation (sup- port for a party or the intention to vote) and notably more support for parties on the right of the political spectrum. We in particular _nd that economic insecurity predicts greater support for both Donald Trump before the 2016 US Presidential election and the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

We here use the employment-history data from the British Cohort Study to calculate an individual’s total experience of unemployment from the time they left education up to age 30. We show that, conditional on current unemployment, this experience is negatively correlated with the life satisfaction that the individual reports at age 30, so that past unemployment scars. We also identify the childhood circumstances and family background that predict this adult unemployment experience. Educational achievement and good behaviour at age 16 both reduce adult unemployment experience, and emotional health at age 16 is a particularly strong predictor of unemployment experience for women. Both boys and girls reproduce on average their parents’ unemployment, so that adult unemployment experience is transmitted between generations. We uncover evidence of a social-norm effect: children from less-advantaged backgrounds both experience more adult unemployment but are less affected by it in well-being.

We combine household surveys and national accounts, as well as recently released tax data to track the dynamics of Indian income inequality from 1922 to 2015. According to our benchmark estimates, the top 1 percent of earners captured less than 21 percent of total income in the late 1930s, before dropping to 6 percent in the early 1980s and rising to 22 percent in the recent period. Our results appear to be robust to a range of alternative assumptions seeking to address numerous data limitations. These findings suggest that much more can be done to promote inclusive growth in India. We also stress the need for more transparency on income and wealth statistics, which is key to allow an informed democratic debate on inequality.

Le modèle TAXIPP est le modèle de microsimulation socio-fiscal développé au sein de l’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP). Cet outil vise à simuler les prélèvements obligatoires et transferts monétaires du système redistributif français. Ce document méthodologique présente la version 1.1 du modèle. Il décrit son fonctionnement dans le détail, à savoir les données utilisées, la structure du simulateur ainsi que l’ensemble des choix méthodologiques opérés. Par rapport à la version 1.0, la version 1.1 simule l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF) et l’impôt sur la fortune immobilière (IFI) à partir des données administratives associées à ces deux impôts. La version 1.1 fait suite au récent passage à la version 1.0, qui a représenté un changement important tant dans les sources que dans l’architecture du simulateur. Les données utilisées dans ce modèle sont issues d’un appariement statistique entre données administratives et données d’enquête, l’idée étant d’utiliser des sources administratives autant que possible.

In this paper we combine household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data in order to estimate income concentration in the Middle East for the period 1990–2016. According to our benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64 percent, compared to 37 percent in Western Europe, 47 percent in the US and 55 percent in Brazil (see Alvaredo et al. 2018). This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil‐rich and population‐rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which we probably under‐estimate, given the limited access to proper fiscal data). We stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East, as well as the need to develop mechanisms of regional redistribution and investment.

This paper describes, in a non-technical way, the main impact evaluation methods, both experimental and quasi-experimental, and the statistical model underlying them. In the first part, we provide a brief survey of the papers making use of those methods that have been published by the journal Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics over the past fifteen years. In the second part, some of the most important methodological advances to have recently been put forward in this field of research are presented. To finish, we focus not only on the need to pay particular attention to the accuracy of the estimated effects, but also on the requirement to replicate evaluations, carried out by experimentation or quasi-experimentation, in order to distinguish false positives from proven effects.

In this paper we combine household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data in order to estimate income concentration in the Middle East for the period 1990–2016. According to our benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64 percent, compared to 37 percent in Western Europe, 47 percent in the US and 55 percent in Brazil (see Alvaredo et al. 2018). This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil‐rich and population‐rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which we probably under‐estimate, given the limited access to proper fiscal data). We stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East, as well as the need to develop mechanisms of regional redistribution and investment.

There has been explosive growth in the analysis of subjective well‐being in Economics over the past 40 years. This article reviews some of this growth, and suggests a number of domains in which future research may proceed.

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects inequality. Average pretax real national income per adult has increased 60% from 1980 to 2014, but we find that it has stagnated for the bottom 50% of the distribution at about $16,000 a year. The pretax income of the middle class—adults between the median and the 90th percentile—has grown 40% since 1980, faster than what tax and survey data suggest, due in particular to the rise of tax-exempt fringe benefits. Income has boomed at the top. The upsurge of top incomes was first a labor income phenomenon but has mostly been a capital income phenomenon since 2000. The government has offset only a small fraction of the increase in inequality. The reduction of the gender gap in earnings has mitigated the increase in inequality among adults, but the share of women falls steeply as one moves up the labor income distribution, and is only 11% in the top 0.1% in 2014.

Is the intervention of the state in the healthcare market legitimate and efficient? To answer this question, a clear definition of a health good and its implications is needed. Can we just apply the general definition of a public good for all health goods? Should we consider different types of health goods? If yes, how do we delimit the frontier between a public good and a private good? With a rapid glance at the diversity of organizations in the healthcare system that exist in the world, it appears there is little consensus on what can and should be defined as a public good. Generally speaking, all countries have a mixed health system, combining pro-market elements with welfare state safeguards, and China is no exception: all reforms of the healthcare system implemented since the 1980s have swung between both. To understand the Chinese health system and its recent evolution, we need to start by defining the global framework in which the “health good” is set.

Les vives polémiques qui ont émaillé les neuf années d’existence de la plateforme Admission Postbac (APB) – depuis sa généralisation à l’ensemble des académies en 2009 jusqu’à son abandon en 2017 – ont contribué à mettre en lumière le rôle croissant joué par les algorithmes dans l’orientation et l’affectation des étudiants après le baccalauréat. Peut-on pour autant réduire l’orientation postbac à une question technique ? Les procédures utilisées pour orienter les bacheliers au moment de leur entrée dans l’enseignement supérieur ne mettent-elles pas en œuvre des choix politiques qu’il convient d’interroger ?

Following the example of the United States, most European countries reformed their hospital regulations in the early 2000s, with the introduction of a new payment system aimed at encouraging efficiency in care delivery. Because they put strong pressure on hospitals to lower their costs, wide implementation of these reforms raised concerns for some about quality of care. One solution has been to encourage quality competition among hospitals. The purpose of this volume is to bring together relevant theoretical and empirical results regarding the impact of hospital competition on the quality of care. Contributions come from academic economists recognized as the best specialists of the topic worldwide. They address the following questions: Does more intense competition among hospitals operating under fixed price systems always result in improved quality of care? Do hospital objectives and/or ownership matter? Is the impact identical for different diseases? Is it appropriate to introduce competition among hospitals with different mandates?

The structure of healthcare supply in China is very specific. Indeed, as of 2011, more than 85% of all health personnel worked in public healthcare institutions. In addition, public hospitals provide a very large part of outpatient services on top of their inpatient provision. The goal of this chapter is to explain the reasons behind this very high provision and its consequences. The background presented makes a clear differentiation between rural and urban areas. For each geographical area, a historical and longitudinal reading aims at explaining the current situation. Shortly after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, a healthcare system organized in three tiers, known as the Community Medical System (CMS), was set up in rural locations. Patients had to enter the system through the first tier and were then funnelled into other tiers for the more severe cases. Patients whose affliction required very specific treatment were transferred to urban areas, into provincial or central hospitals. In urban areas, from 1949 to 1980, healthcare access was organized at company level. If, today, the general organization of the healthcare system remains in rural areas, economic as well as administrative reforms have deeply reshaped access to healthcare in these structures.

La Chine connaît actuellement une surutilisation des hôpitaux universitaires et des hôpitaux dotés d’équipements de haute technologie, généralement situés dans les grandes villes. Bien qu’ils disposent d’une grande capacité, ils sont confrontés à des encombrements qui provoquent de longues files d’attente. Parallèlement, les établissements plus petits sont sous-utilisés. Le ministère de la santé estime que 70 % des patients traités dans des hôpitaux universitaires de niveau supérieur (niveau 3) auraient pu recevoir un traitement adéquat dans des hôpitaux de catégorie inférieure, plus proches de leur domicile. En 2009, le gouvernement chinois a publié un plan de développement à grande échelle pour le secteur de la santé, avec plus de 770 milliards de RMB à investir. Quatre ans plus tard, 620 milliards de RMB ont déjà été dépensés, avec la mise en place d’un régime d’assurance publique et la création d’un réseau de centres de santé communautaires. Pourtant, ce problème clé du système de santé chinois, à savoir la concentration de la demande sur un petit nombre d’hôpitaux, demeure, ce qui finit par créer des relations tendues entre les médecins et les patients, ainsi que des actes de violence de plus en plus fréquents. L’origine de cette violence ainsi que les orientations possibles pour restaurer la confiance, le respect et la compréhension entre les patients et le personnel médical sont examinées. La décentralisation de la qualité des soins semble être la clé, mais il existe différentes manières d’atteindre cet objectif. De toute évidence, les outils numériques tels que les objets de santé connectés et d’autres services en ligne sont susceptibles de jouer un rôle croissant dans la résolution de ce problème.

This chapter addresses the increasing role of digital healthcare in the overall Chinese healthcare system. As described in previous chapters, the healthcare system faces many issues, such as the confrontational relationship between doctors and patients, the poor access for populations in rural areas, the significant mark-up throughout distribution channels, a financially heavy burden for chronic diseases, poor quality of healthcare supply and inefficient hospital operation except Level 3 hospitals that have to deal with an over-demand. Many solutions have been proposed, such as the multiplication of healthcare suppliers, the establishment of general practitioners as gatekeepers for hospital admissions, the implementation of public health insurance schemes or the government support for reforms in favour of private health insurance and private healthcare providers. However, they have not proven sufficient to solve all problems yet. Digital healthcare is likely to play an increasing part in addressing these issues. One of the strengths of e-health is the quick and widespread adoption of mobile platforms. This may help solve access challenges, through online appointment registration systems, models of online-offline services, two-communication platforms between patients and physicians, sharing information through the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, the generalized implementation of a DRG-based payment system, making patients more increasingly active actors in maintaining the health status, and improving the online drug market. On the flip side, this also raises many concerns regarding the confidentiality of personal medical data and the monopoly situation of some internet companies.

While gender gaps in average math performance are now close to zero in developed countries, women are still strongly underrepresented among math high performers (1). This gender gap contributes to the underrepresentation of women in math and science in higher education and to their subsequent worse position in the labor market (2, 3). With the roles of nature and nurture (4–6) on gender performance gaps having been debated for more than a century, research in the 1990s and 2000s (7–9) suggested a cultural origin, relating gender gaps in math to measures of countries’ gender inequality. However, with more recent studies (10–12) having shown that this relation is weak, today we have no clearly identified relationship between countries’ socioeconomic or cultural environment and the gender gap in math. We relate below gender gaps in math to societal inequalities that are not directly related to gender. We find a strong and robust relationship and provide tests suggesting that it is causal: Countries that are generally more egalitarian, or that have institutions more conductive to equality, have a lower gender performance gap in math, suggesting that this gap is partly shaped by more general societal inequalities.

What makes people happy? Why should governments care about people’s well-being? How would policy change if well-being was the main objective? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a uniquely comprehensive range of evidence from longitudinal data on over one hundred thousand individuals in Britain, the United States, Australia, and Germany, the authors consider the key factors that affect human well-being.

Health insurance in China is the topic of this chapter. Up until the economic reforms of the 1980s, communities (a village or a group of villages) were managing the social welfare of their inhabitants. The system was extremely decentralized. With the collapse of the community medical system, existing public establishments were either replaced by private ones, or put into competition with them. As a result, the healthcare access system was no longer free of charge and became unaffordable to many. During the period of absence of a centralized public insurance system, this lack of access to treatment became a major problem; at first for the most vulnerable part of the population, and gradually for a greater and greater proportion of rural dwellers. As the question of healthcare costs causing widespread poverty became a pressing issue, different public health insurance programmes were implemented. Today, geographical inequity is still observed for these programmes. There is variability not only in terms of funding eligibility, types of illness or services to be covered, but also in terms of levels of benefits and payments methods. Concerning the private health insurance market, it was next to nothing in the early 2000s. Today, the rise of private health insurance schemes is supported by the Chinese government and is finding an audience among the emerging upper middle class.

This chapter focuses on hospital ownership and supervision. Public hospitals are mostly, but not always, under the supervision of the Health Ministry. There are a certain number of other governing bodies that are directly involved in the management of hospitals. A cross-ministry group was set up in 2006 to facilitate the implementation of hospital reforms. Apart from the organizational structure, the funding of hospitals and its evolution is studied. Between 1979 and 1991, the government introduced a co-payment system in healthcare establishments. In 1992, the Ministry of Health officially granted greater autonomy to public hospitals. They were authorized to deliver paid services and to make profits, but were made responsible for their losses and debts. By 2003, central government funding had fallen to 8% of the hospital budget. As a result, public hospitals in China behave very similarly to for-profit firms, while being governed as any traditional public structure. The next step is the current experiment of a Diagnostics Related Group-based payment in China. Along with the financial autonomy of public hospitals, different reforms have been directed at developing private hospitals, even though many obstacles still remain.

This chapter summarises concepts, methods, and goals of the WID.world project, the World Inequality Database, along with some first results from this source. WID.world builds on the experience of the World Top Incomes Database (WTID) to construct time-series on the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution in more than 30 countries, to include wealth distribution and developing as well as developed countries. The ultimate goal of WID.world is to provide annual estimates of the distribution of income and wealth using concepts consistent with macro-economic accounts, i.e. to construct distributional national accounts (DINA). WID.world also aims to produce synthetic micro-files providing online information on income and wealth (i.e. individual level data that do not result from direct observation but rather through estimates that reproduce the observed distribution of the underlying data). The long-run aim of the WID.world project is to release income and wealth synthetic DINA micro-files for all countries on an annual basis.

China has around 2.79 million licensed physicians, among which 90% have received some kind of training in Western medicine in addition to Chinese traditional medicine. China has far more doctors than nurses. This is inherited from Chinese history, with the barefoot doctor system. In terms of education level, as many as 70% of healthcare suppliers did not have a bachelor degree in 2013. One of the current goals of Chinese authorities is to reinforce the training level and to ensure sufficient access to skilled healthcare personnel. Besides, there are important disparities in healthcare access between rural and urban areas. These disparities concern not only the number of medical employees per bed but also the average level of qualification available. In this chapter, we also explore the administrative status of public medical staff (bianzhi status) and their working conditions (salary, financial incentives and informal bonuses amounting to bribery). The development of the family doctor, through specific training and career paths, is usually seen as a key reform, which is now at the pilot programme stage.

China is the second largest pharmaceutical market in the world. This sector grew by 21.4% between 2002 and 2012. In OECD countries, spending on medical drugs accounted for approximately 17% of total health spending or 1.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009. That same year, spending on pharmaceutical products in China represented 43% of the total healthcare expenditure. Aware of the issue, the Chinese government has reacted. A limitation on the hospital mark-up on drugs has been implemented and a list of key drugs that are considered essential has been set up. Drugs on this list have to be accessible to everyone, with a regulated price to be kept as low as possible. To keep prices low, procurement is made through centralized bidding at provincial level, pharmaceutical companies delivering directly to medical facilities. Yet, in the field, the reality remains at times complex, with different ways to circumvent these constraints.

In this paper, we address two issues: i) how hospital employment changes with local unemployment, according to the type of hospital ownership, and ii) whether this relationship changed after the implementation of a pro-competitive reform that made hospitals more similar. A 2006-2010 French panel of 1,695 hospitals over five waves allows us to consider within-hospital employment changes. We first find that higher local unemployment is associated with greater employment in State-owned hospitals, but not for any other hospital ownership type: French local authorities then seem to respond to depressed local labour markets by increasing employment in State-owned hospitals. After the full implementation of the pro-competitive reform hospital funding became based only on activity and no longer on some historical budget. Theoretically, the new reimbursement system should break the relationship between public-hospital employment and local unemployment. Our results reveal that the reform worked as expected in less-deprived areas: reducing employment and eliminating the correlation between local unemployment and State-owned hospital employment. However, in higher-unemployment areas, public-hospital employment remains 2 counter-cyclical. Poor local labour-market health then seems to trump financial incentives in determining employment in public hospitals.

Today, China’s public hospitals manage 90% of consultations for what English-speakers would call ambulatory care or outpatient care 1 , and 90% of hospital inpatient admissions. As such, public hospitals deal with the demand for treatment by consultation just as they must deal with treatment for inpatients. China is in the midst of a paradox. There has been a spectacular upward surge in health indicators, matching a similar increase in economic indicators. It is also a colossal market, with healthcare expenditures reaching $511.3 billion in 2013. 2 That is equivalent to 5.6% of GDP. 3 On the other hand, the health system has officially been described as inefficient, and there is a toxic atmosphere between medical staff and patients.

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting. In six waves of German Socio-Economic Panel data, the extent to which own labour income is perceived to be unfair is significantly negatively correlated with subjective well-being, both in terms of cognitive evaluations (life and job satisfaction) and affect (the frequency of feeling happy, sad and angry). Perceived unfairness also translates into objective labour-market behaviour, with current unfair income predicting future job quits.

In this paper, we address two issues: i) how hospital employment changes with local unemployment, according to the type of hospital ownership, and ii) whether this relationship changed after the implementation of a pro-competitive reform that made hospitals more similar. A 2006–2010 French panel of 1695 hospitals over five waves allows us to consider within-hospital employment changes. We first find that higher local unemployment is associated with greater employment in State-owned hospitals, but not for any other hospital ownership type: French local authorities then seem to respond to depressed local labour markets by increasing employment in State-owned hospitals. After the full implementation of the pro-competitive reform hospital funding became based only on activity and no longer on some historical budget. Theoretically, the new reimbursement system should break the relationship between public-hospital employment and local unemployment. Our results reveal that the reform worked as expected in less-deprived areas: reducing employment and eliminating the correlation between local unemployment and State-owned hospital employment. However, in higher-unemployment areas, public-hospital employment remains counter-cyclical. Poor local labour-market health then seems to trump financial incentives in determining employment in public hospitals.

We show that global income inequality can be relatively well estimated from 1980 to 2016, by combining data on national incomes and available Distributional National Accounts. Our contribution is threefold. First, we attempt to go beyond country-level inequality data by comparing inequality dynamics between and within large geographic aggregates such as Europe, North America or Asia. We show that inequality increased almost everywhere, but at different speeds, revealing the important of national institutions and policy in the shaping of inequality. Second, we combine data on income inequality within these aggregates to estimate a global distribution of income since 1980. We show that our general conclusions are robust to several alternative methodologies to measure global inequality. According to our benchmark results, the global richest 1% adults captured 27% of total income growth since 1980, that is two times more than the bottom 50% adults, who collectively captured 12% of total growth over the period. The top 1% income share increased from 16% to 20% over the period. We observe a trend-break after the financial crisis, but this is only due to between-country reduction in inequality, as within-country inequality continued to rise. Third, we estimate the future evolution of global inequality between 2016 and 2050 by testing several assumptions about national income and population growth rates and inequality dynamics. We find that optimist assumptions about growth in emerging countries in the future will not be sufficient reduce global inequality between individuals between now and 2050 if countries continue their own inequality trends since 1980, highlighting the need for a renewed debate on the set of policies required to generare more equitable growth pathways.

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in Russia from the Soviet period until the present day. We find that official survey-based measures vastly under-estimate the rise of inequality since 1990. According to our benchmark estimates, top income shares are now similar to (or higher than) the levels observed in the United States. We also find that inequality has increased substantially more in Russia than in China and other ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. We relate this finding to the specific transition strategy followed in Russia. According to our benchmark estimates, the wealth held offshore by rich Russians is about three times larger than official net foreign reserves, and is comparable in magnitude to total household financial assets held in Russia.

Le système de prestations sociales actuel suscite des débats sur de nombreuses dimensions : non-recours aux minima sociaux, empilement de dispositifs multiples, conditions restrictives d’éligibilité pour la population jeune, etc. Face à ces enjeux, 13 conseils départementaux (l’Ardèche, l’Ariège, l’Aude, la Dordogne, le Gers, la Gironde, la Haute-Garonne, l’Ille-et-Vilaine, les Landes, le Lot-et-Garonne, la Meurthe-et-Moselle, la Nièvre et la Seine-Saint-Denis) ont lancé un projet d’expérimentation de la mise en place d’un revenu de base simplifiant le système existant et ouvert à tout individu au-dessus d’un certain âge sous condition de ressources. Un préalable à la mise en œuvre de ce projet est la définition du ou des scénarios de réforme à expérimenter. Ce rapport s’inscrit dans cet objectif, en évaluant ex-ante les effets budgétaires et redistributifs de plusieurs scénarios de réforme définis par les conseils départementaux impliqués. À partir du modèle de microsimulation TAXIPP 1.0, qui mobilise à la fois des données administratives de source fiscale et des données d’enquête, ce rapport propose deux schémas de simplification du système existant : le remplacement du Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA) et de la prime d’activité par un dispositif simplifié d’une part, et l’intégration des aides au logement dans le nouveau dispositif unifié d’autre part. Sont notamment évalués les effets de l’ouverture de ces dispositifs aux individus de 18 à 24 ans, qui sont aujourd’hui les plus touchés par la pauvreté.

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

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

Using recent data from the French Labor Force Survey, this paper explores how diversity affects individuals’ employment prospects at various geographic levels. Employment correlates positively with local labor market diversity, but negatively with neighborhood diversity. Using several approaches to deal with the endogeneity of local labor market diversity, we do not find any robust evidence of a causal impact of diversity on employment at this rather aggregate level, suggesting that immigrants actually tend to self-select into more economically dynamic areas. However, taking advantage of the very precise localization of the data in order to correct biases related to residential sorting, we confirm a negative effect of neighborhood diversity. We also show that diversity in terms of nationalities matters more than diversity based on parents’ origins, giving insights on the underlying mechanisms.

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

We focus on the design of an institutional device aimed to foster coordination through communication. We explore whether the social psychology theory of commitment, implemented via a truth-telling oath, can reduce coordination failure. Using a classic coordination game, we ask all players to sign voluntarily a truth-telling oath before playing the game with cheap talk communication. Three results emerge with commitment under oath: (1) coordination increased by nearly 50 percent; (2) senders’ messages were significantly more truthful and actions more efficient, and (3) receivers’ trust of messages increased.

L’évaluation des politiques publiques repose en grande partie sur une démarche scientifique visant à améliorer nos connaissances quant à l’impact des nombreuses variantes de politiques publiques. Cette démarche reconnaît comme point de départ l’étendue de notre ignorance en la matière – une chose pas forcément aisée à partager avec les responsables politiques – et ainsi la nécessité d’approfondir, par l’évaluation, nos connaissances quant aux meilleures façons d’atteindre les objectifs fixés par le débat démocratique [1].

Si les femmes sont aujourd’hui plus diplômées en moyenne que les hommes en France, comme dans la plupart des pays développés, elles restent largement sous-représentées dans les filières et les métiers scientifiques et techniques, notamment ceux liés aux mathématiques, à la physique ou à l’informatique. Les écarts de compétences entre les filles et les garçons dans les matières scientifiques sont faibles et ne peuvent expliquer qu’une petite partie de ces écarts d’orientation. La confiance en soi, les normes sociales et les stéréotypes de genre sont en revanche de plus en plus invoqués comme des facteurs explicatifs prépondérants. À partir d’une vaste enquête par questionnaire menée auprès de 8 500 lycéens franciliens, cette étude vise à objectiver l’existence de ces facteurs, et à les relier aux choix d’orientation. Elle documente d’abord l’ampleur des différences entre filles et garçons en termes de goût déclaré pour les sciences et de confiance en soi dans les matières scientifiques. Elle révèle ensuite que la prévalence des stéréotypes concernant les métiers scientifiques et la place des femmes au sein de ces métiers est loin d’être négligeable en milieu scolaire. Cependant, lorsqu’on met en relation les choix d’études des élèves avec leur niveau en mathématiques et en français, leur goût déclaré pour les sciences, leur confiance en soi, et leurs représentations stéréotypées, on trouve que le niveau en mathématiques et les stéréotypes ne parviennent à expliquer qu’une toute petite partie des différences d’orientation des filles et des garçons vers les filières scientifiques. À l’inverse, le goût déclaré pour les sciences et la confiance en soi en mathématiques, quel que soit l’indicateur retenu pour la mesurer, permettent d’expliquer une part importante des écarts d’orientation vers les sciences selon le genre.

Ce manuel offre une présentation complète et approfondie des techniques économétriques les plus utilisées dans la pratique, allant du modèle linéaire et ses extensions aux techniques non linéaires de traitement des données discrètes et censurées.Cette deuxième édition, entièrement revue, corrigée et mise à jour, offre une présentation complète et approfondie des techniques économétriques les plus utilisées dans la pratique, allant du modèle linéaire et ses extensions, aux techniques non linéaires de traitement des données discrètes et censurées. Une annexe fournit l’ensemble des éléments de rappel d’algèbre linéaire et de statistiques nécessaires.Une attention particulière est en outre consacrée aux outils d’évaluation des politiques publiques : évaluations randomisées, estimateurs par différence, méthodes de score. Les techniques qui sont présentées sont systématiquement illustrées par des exemples sur données réelles ou la présentation de travaux de recherche consacrés à l’évaluation des politiques publiques (économie du travail, économie industrielle, etc.).Le parti pris de cet ouvrage est de placer les problèmes d’identification au centre de la démarche économétrique. La présentation met l’accent sur le lien entre la modélisation théorique, la spécification économétrique et la nature des données.L’ouvrage s’adresse aux étudiants de fin de premier cycle ou de deuxième cycle en économie, gestion ou école de commerce, mais aussi aux professionnels souhaitant approfondir leur connaissance des techniques mobilisées dans l’utilisation de l’économétrie à des fins d’évaluation.

Objective To investigate whether staffing levels of maternity units affect prelabor urgent, elective, and intrapartum cesarean delivery rates. Methods This population-based retrospective cohort study covers the deliveries of the 11 hospitals of a French perinatal network in 2008–2014 (N = 102 236). The independent variables were women’s demographic and medical characteristics as well as the type, organization, and staffing levels for obstetricians, anesthesiologists, and midwives of each maternity unit. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted with multilevel logistic models. Results Overall, 23.9% of the women had cesarean deliveries (2.4% urgent before labor, 10% elective, and 11.5% intrapartum). Independently of individual- and hospital-level factors, the level of obstetricians, measured by the number of full-time equivalent persons (i.e., 35 working hours per week) per 100 deliveries, was negatively associated with intrapartum cesarean delivery (adjusted odds ratio, aOR 0.55, 95% confidence interval, CI 0.36–0.83, P-value = 0.005), and the level of midwives negatively associated with elective cesarean delivery (aOR 0.79, 95% CI 0.69–0.90, P-value < 0.001). Accordingly, a 10% increase in obstetrician and midwife staff levels, respectively, would have been associated with a decrease in the likelihood of intrapartum cesarean delivery by 2.5 percentage points and that of elective cesarean delivery by 3.4 percentage points. These changes represent decreases in intrapartum and elective cesarean delivery rates of 19% (from 13.1% to 10.6%) and 33% (from 10.3% to 6.9%), respectively. Conclusion Staffing levels of maternity units affect the use of cesarean deliveries. High staffing levels for obstetricians and midwives are associated with lower cesarean rates.

Over the past two decades, experimental economics has moved from a fringe activity to become a standard tool for empirical research. With experimental economics now regarded as part of the basic tool-kit for applied economics, this book demonstrates how controlled experiments can be a useful in providing evidence relevant to economic research. Professors Jacquemet and L’Haridon take the standard model in applied econometrics as a basis to the methodology of controlled experiments. Methodological discussions are illustrated with standard experimental results. This book provides future experimental practitioners with the means to construct experiments that fit their research question, and new comers with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of controlled experiments. Graduate students and academic researchers working in the field of experimental economics will be able to learn how to undertake, understand and criticise empirical research based on lab experiments, and refer to specific experiments, results or designs completed with case study applications.

In situations where social payoffs are not aligned with private incentives, enforcement with fines can be a way to sustain cooperation. In this paper we show, by the means of a lab experiment , that past fines can have an effect on current behavior even when no longer in force. We document two mechanisms: a) past fines affect directly individuals’ future propensity to cooperate; b) when fines for non cooperation are in place in the past, individuals experience higher levels of cooperation from partners and, consistent with indirect reciprocity motives, are in turn nicer towards others once these fines have been removed. This second mechanism is empirically prevalent and, in contrast with the first, induces a snowball effect of past enforcement. Our results can inform the design of costly enforcement policies.

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

How efficient is the Chinese healthcare system? Milcent examines the medication market in China against the global picture of healthcare organization, and how public healthcare insurance plans have been implemented in recent years, as well as reforms to tackle hospital inefficiency. Healthcare reforms, demographic changes and an increase in wealth inequity have altered healthcare preferences, which need to be addressed. Significantly, the patient–medical staff relationship is analysed, with new proposals for different lines of communication. Milcent puts forward digital healthcare in China as a tool to solve inefficiency and rising tensions, and generate profit. Where China is leading in the digitalization of healthcare, other countries can learn important lessons. Chinese social models are also put into context with respect to current reforms and experimentation.

Oath taking for senior executives has been promoted as a means to enhance honesty within and toward organizations. Herein we explore whether people who voluntarily sign a solemn truth-telling oath are more committed to sincere behavior when offered the chance to lie. We design an experiment to test how the oath affects truth telling in two contexts: a neutral context replicating the typical experiment in the literature, and a “loaded” context in which we remind subjects that “a lie is a lie.” We consider four payoff configurations, with differential monetary incentives to lie, implemented as within-subjects treatment variables. The results are reinforced by robustness investigations in which each subject made only one lying decision. Our results show that the oath reduces lying, especially in the loaded environment—falsehoods are reduced by 50%. The oath, however, has a weaker effect on lying in the neutral environment. The oath did affect decision times in all instances: the average person takes significantly more time deciding whether to lie under oath.

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.

We here consider the effect of unfair income on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting. In five waves of German Socio-Economic Panel data, those who perceive their labour income to be unfair have significantly lower subjective well-being, both in terms of cognitive evaluations (life and job satisfaction) and affect (the frequency of feeling happy, sad, angry and worried). Perceived unfairness also translates into objective labour-market behaviour, with current unfair income predicting future job quits.

In this paper, we investigate the effect on quality, quantity and prices of an innovative fishing gear introduced for a subsample of vessels on a single wholesale fish market in France. Estimations are conducted using transaction data over the 2009-2011 period during which the innovation was introduced. Using a difference-in-differences approach around the discontinuity, we find that for the treated the innovation has a large effect on quality (29.2 percentage points) and prices (23.2 percentage points). A shift in caught fish species is observed and new targeted species are fished very intensively. We also quantify the treatment effect on the treated market from aggregate market data using factor models and a synthetic control approach. We find a sizable effect of the innovation on market quality which is consistent with non-treated vessels adapting their fishing practices to remain competitive. The innovation has no effect on market quantities and prices.

La part des dépenses de santé en France représente 12 % du Produit intérieur brut (PIB). Elle se situe après les États-Unis et le Pays-Bas. Cette part est très proche d’autres pays tels que l’Allemagne. Les hôpitaux représentent une grande part des dépenses. Toutefois, il s’agit de la part la plus maîtrisée. Les hôpitaux ne représentent plus que 36 % des dépenses de santé en France, contre 43 % en 1983. Ainsi, oui l’hôpital coûte cher mais de moins en moins cher.

Comment contenir le déferlement de la vague populiste qui risque de balayer nos démocraties ? Comment prévenir l’éclatement de l’Union européenne ? Pour en finir avec des politiques économiques disqualifiées, mettre l’austérité en minorité et lutter contre les inégalités, il est urgent de démocratiser le gouvernement de la zone euro. Rédigé par une équipe pluridisciplinaire de juristes, politistes et économistes, repris par Benoît Hamon, le projet de traité, ici présenté et commenté, institue une Assemblée parlementaire de la zone euro permettant de promouvoir la justice fiscale et sociale. Le traité peut être adopté en l’état par les pays qui s’y rallieront. Le texte est précédé d’une introduction qui expose sa mise en œuvre de façon pédagogique. L’objectif est que chaque citoyen s’empare du débat européen et que les différentes forces sociales et politiques contribuent à améliorer ce projet et à nous sortir de la sinistrose ambiante.

We propose an assignment model in which positions along a hierarchy are attributed to individuals depending on their characteristics. Our theoretical framework can be used to study differences in assignment and outcomes across groups and we show how it can motivate decomposition and counterfactual exercises. It constitutes an alternative to more descriptive methods such as Oaxaca decompositions and quantile counterfactual approaches. In an application, we study gender disparities in the public and private sectors with a French exhaustive administrative dataset. Whereas females are believed to be treated more fairly in the public sector, we find that the gender gap in propensity to get job positions along the wage distribution is rather similar in the two sectors. The gender wage gap in the public sector is 13:3 points and it increases by only 0:7 percentage points when workers are assigned to job positions according to the rules of the private sector. Nevertheless, the gender gap at the last decile in the public sector increases by as much as 3:6 percentage points when using the assignment rules of the private sector.

This paper provides historical series on the evolution of the share of inherited wealth in aggregate private wealth in Europe (France, the UK, Germany, Sweden) and the USA over the 1900–2010 period. Until 1910, the inheritance share was very high in Europe (70–80%). It then fell abruptly following the 1914–45 shocks, down to about 30–40% during the 1950–80 period, and is back to 50–60% (and rising) since around 2010. The US pattern also appears to be U-shaped, albeit less marked, and with significant uncertainty regarding recent trends, due to data limitations. We discuss possible interpretations for these long-run patterns.

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data.

We document changes in labour supply, wage and education by gender and marital status using the British Household Panel Survey, 1991-2008, and seek to disentangle the main channels behind these changes. To this end, we use a version of Goussé, Jacquemet, and Robin (2016)’s search-matching model of the marriage market with labour supply, which does not use information on home production time inputs. We derive conditions under which the model is identified. We estimate different parameters for each year. This allows us to quantify how much of the changes in labour supply, wage and education by gender and marital status depends on changes in the preferences for leisure of men and women and how much depends on changes in homophily.

Ce papier examine la raison pour les difficultés d’insertion des jeunes docteurs par rapport aux ingénieurs en France. En utilisant les données de l’enquête « Génération 2004 » du CEREQ, nous démontrons l’écart entre les taux d’insertion des docteurs et des ingénieurs et les situent par rapport à l’ensemble de diplômes du système post-secondaire. Nous mon-trons que ce phénomène persiste même pour les postes de recherche et développement, et que la différence s’explique largement par les différences entres les choix de spécialisa-tion des docteurs et ingénieurs. Nous montrons également que le demande des employeurs pour les docteurs est peu sensible à leur coût, dans le mesure où seulement la subvention massive du « dispositif jeunes docteurs » de la dernière reforme du crédit impôt recherche a permis d’améliorer l’insertion relatif des docteurs par rapport aux ingénieurs.

We study the incidence of social security contributions (SSCs) in France relying on the strategy developed by Alvaredo et al. (De Econ, 2017. doi:10.1007/s10645-017-9294-7). This strategy infers the incidence of SSCSs from the discontinuities in earnings distributions created by kink points in the SSC schedule. Using administrative data on earnings for the period 1976–2010, we study approximately 200 such kink points and do not find that they systematically induce a discontinuity in the distribution of gross earnings. This allows us to reject the hypothesis that SSCs are incident on workers, at least locally around kinks. Additionally, we exploit the large variations in SSC rates across kinks and years to estimate the local incidence of both employer and employee SSCs around these thresholds. We find that employer SSCs are shifted to employers while employee SSCs are shifted to employees. These findings are consistent with the economic incidence of SSCs being aligned with their statutory incidence, locally around kink points.

There is considerable evidence from a variety of sources to suggest that well-being is a function of relative income. These findings have been used to explain the Easterlin Paradox, whereby a rise in income for all does not lead to a rise in average happiness in a country (even though the cross section relationship between income and happiness is positive). This relativity of utility has led to calls for policy to focus away from GDP. I here first discuss some of the evidence that well-being is indeed relative in income, but then consider two relatively little-analysed issues to suggest that there may continue to be a role for GDP per capita in happiness-based policy: the inequality of subjective well-being, and the specific case of those in income poverty.

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average of adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effect of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time, but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth cohorts child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BCS.

We use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to consider the distal and proximal correlates of happiness and eudaimonia in later life. Even after controlling for proximal covariates, outcomes at age 18 (IQ score, parental income and parental education) remain good predictors of well-being over 50 years later. In terms of the proximal covariates, mental health and social participation are the strongest predictors of well-being. Although some factors are important in explaining both happiness and eudaimonia, there are notable differences between the two measures: well-being policy will thus depend to an extent on which measure is preferred.

Herein we explore whether a solemn oath can eliminate hypothetical bias in a voting referenda, a popular elicitation mechanism promoted in non-market valuation exercises for its incentive compatibility properties. First, we reject the null hypothesis that a hypothetical bias does not exist. Second, we observe that people who sign an oath are significantly less likely to vote for the public good in a hypothetical referenda. We complement this evidence with a self-reported measure of honesty which confirms that the oath increases truthfulness in answers. This result opens interesting avenues for improving the elicitation of preferences in the lab and beyond.

Nous présentons la mise en place d’une expérience lors d’un évènement grand public national, de manière simultanée dans 11 villes françaises, en septembre 2015. L’expérience a impliqué plus de 2700 participants et a duré quatre heures ininterrompues. L’objectif de cet article est à la fois de fournir une feuille de route pour une éventuelle réplication et de penser à la manière dont la discipline peut investir des terrains nouveaux (vulgarisation, pédagogie populaire, communication grand public).

La méthode expérimentale a profondément influencé les développements récents de la sciencé economique. L’utilisation d’expériences, et son caractère quasi-systématiquè a partir des années 1990, a permis de développer uné evaluation empiriquè a la fois des hypothèses sur lesquelles repose l’analyse théorique (par exemple : combien d’acteurs sont nécessaires nécessairesà donner du sensàsensà la notion d’atomicité, qui se traduit empiriquement par des agents qui se comportent comme preneurs de prix ? Quel horizon temporel réplique la notion de jeu infiniment répété, dont la conséquence essentielle est de rendre les décisions contemporaines indépendantes desévénementsdesévénements futurs ?), mais aussi des prédictions de modèles spécifiques (l’´ equilibre offre-demande sur un marché, la formation des prix et l’allocation d’un bien dans le cadre d’une enchère). L’´ economie expérimentale a ainsi mis enévidenceenévidence la pertinence et la validité de certaines approches théoriques, malgré des hypothèses souvent très fortes sur les comportements individuels et sociaux, mais aussi leurs limites dans un certain nombre d’autres situations. Les deux lauréats du » Prix Nobel d’´ economie » (ou Prix de la Banque deSù ede en mémoire d’Alfred Nobel) dont la distinction fut explicitement motivée par leurs contributions expérimentales, illustrent parfaitement cette tension : les travaux de Vernon Smith montrent que, pour certaines institutions d’´ echanges bien définies, les marchés fonctionnent demanì ere très cohérente avec la théorie de la concurrence pure et parfaite, alors même que la plupart des hypothèses sous-jacentesàjacentesà cette théorie sont, au mieux, modérément satisfaites. A contrario, Daniel Kahneman, co-lauréat la même année, reçoit le prix pour la mise enévidenceenévidence de biais cognitifs et d’une tendance des individusàindividusà s’´ ecarter des canons de la rationalité mis en avant dans les modèles microéconomiques. Sur la base de cette tension et en lien trèstrèsétroit avec l’´ economie expérimentale, s’est développé un nouveau champ de recherche, l’´ economie comportementale, dont l’objectif est d’enrichir et amender l’approche théorique des décisions individuelles et sociales sur la base de régularités psy-chologiques. Il s’agit d’incorporer aux modèles canoniques les motivations non-monétaires et les inclinations moinségo¨ıstesmoinségo¨moinségo¨ıstes des individus, ou les raccourcis cognitifs sur lesquels ils peuvent se fonder, pour prendre leurs décisions ou encore d’´ eventuelles incohérences de com-portement. Les résultats de l’´ economie expérimentale, du moins les plus robustes et les plus souvent répliqués, ne font plusgù ere l’objet de débat au sein de la discipline, et l’approche comportementale s’est quantàquantà elle progressivement diffuséè a tous les champs de l’analyséanalysé economique.

Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and expertise, and he made contributions right across economics. His death on 1 January 2017 deprived the world of both an intellectual giant and a deeply committed public servant in the broadest sense of the term. This collective tribute highlights the range, depth and importance of Tony’s enormous legacy, the product of almost fifty years’ work.

We here consider the cognitive and non-cognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to show that early childhood financial problems are associated with worse adolescent cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, controlling for both income and a set of standard variables. The estimated effect of financial problems is almost always larger in size than that of income. Around one quarter to one half of the effect of financial problems on the non-cognitive outcomes seems to transit through mother’s mental health.

While there is now something of a consensus in the economics of happiness literature that income comparisons to others help determine subjective well-being, debate continues over the relative importance of own and reference-group income, in particular in research on the Easterlin paradox. The variety of results in this domain have produced some scepticism regarding happiness analysis, and in particular with respect to the measurement of reference-group income. We here use data from an original Internet survey in Japan to compare the relative-income results from happiness regressions to those from hypothetical-choice experiments. This kind of validation of experienced utility via direct comparison with decision utility remains rare in this literature.

The nature of the relationship between lifetime income and saving rates is a longstanding empirical question and one that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. We use a new data set containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings and administrative data on earnings histories to examine this question. We find, for a sample of English households, evidence of a positive relationship between the rate of private wealth accumulation and levels of lifetime earnings. Even when state pension wealth is included, the top quintile of lifetime earnings have significantly higher wealth to lifetime earnings ratios than the other quintiles. Under this broad measure of wealth, those in the middle of the distribution of lifetime earnings accumulate the least wealth relative to their earnings.

Si le visage du dernier récipiendaire du prix Nobel d’économie, Richard Thaler, vous est familier, c’est soit que vous êtes un économiste ouvert aux approches aventureuses, soit que vous êtes cinéphile et avez retenu sa brève apparition dans le film The Big Short : le casse du siècle [d’Adam McKay, 2015] (apparition durant laquelle il explique à Selena Gomez les mécanismes de la crise financière). Richard Thaler a largement contribué à l’approche dite comportementale en économie, qui vise à pallier les insuffisances prédictives de la métaphore de l’Homo economicus, cet être capable de prendre des décisions toujours logiques et parfaitement adaptées aux objectifs qu’il souhaite atteindre… Ses travaux ont ainsi conduit à repenser radicalement la contribution des sciences économiques à l’aide à la décision publique.

Recent evidence reveals that transportation’s improvements within metropolitan areas have a clear effect on population and job decentralization processes. Yet, very little has been said on how these improvements affect the spatial organization of the economic activity in the suburbs. This paper analyses the effects of transportation’s changes on employment subcenters formation. Using data from metropolitan Paris between 1968 and 2010, we first show that the spatial pattern of job decentralization is reinforcing the polycentric nature of Paris: the number of subcenters grew from 21 in 1968 to 35 in 2010 and the employment growth was very intense within them. Second, our main contribution is to show that the new rail transit clearly affects the emergence of subcenters: not only does the presence of a rail station increase the probability of a suburban municipality of becoming (part of) a subcenter by 5 to 10%, but a 10% increase in municipality proximity to a suburban station is found to increase its chance to be part of a subcenter by 3 to 5%.

Ce papier étudie la variabilité des coûts hospitaliers pour des séjours comparables en pathologies et en procédures (GHM). A l’époque du budget global, une forte variabilité des coûts était observée entre les hôpitaux publics français. Qu’en est – il aujourd’hui ? Théoriquement, la T2A conduit les établissements à minimiser leurs coûts pour gagner la différence entre le forfait et le coût. Nous montrons une certaine homogénéisation des coûts et à une réelle prise en compte de l’hétérogénéité des individus. Les forfaits par GHM ne capturent cependant pas toute l’hétérogénéité entre les établissements, ni entre les patients. Ainsi, les effets néfastes de sélection des patients ou de diminution du niveau de qualité ne sont pas évités par les forfaits actuels.

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

We develop a search model of marriage where men and women draw utility from private consumption and leisure, and from a non-market good that is produced in the home using time resources. We condition individual decisions on wages, education, and an index of family attitudes. A match-specific, stochastic bliss shock induces variation in matching given wages, education, and family values, and triggers renegotiation and divorce. Using BHPS (1991–2008) data, we take as given changes in wages, education, and family values by gender, and study their impact on marriage decisions and intra-household resource allocation. The model allows to evaluate how much of the observed gender differences in labor supply results from wages, education, and family attitudes. We find that family attitudes are a strong determinant of comparative advantages in home production of men and women, whereas education complementarities induce assortative mating through preferences.

This paper analyzes the influence of transportation infrastructure, and in particular of the Regional Express Rail (RER), on employment and population growth in the Paris metropolitan area between 1968 and 2010. In order to make proper causal inference, we rely on historical instruments and control for all other transportation modes that could be complement or substitute to the RER. Our results show that proximity to an RER station increases employment and population density and, in particular, employment and population growth. The latter effects are higher in municipalities located near RER stations and close to employment (sub)centers. They are also found to be particularly strong for jobs in the service sector, for factory workers, and for highly educated population. We find no impact of the RER expansion on employment growth during the first part of the period, while the effect on population growth appears earlier but declines over time.

We put forward a method for estimating discount rates using wealth and income data. We build consumption from these data using the budget constraint. Consumption transitions yield discount rates by household groups. Applying this technique to a sample of older households, we find a similar distribution to those previously estimated using field data, though with a much lower mean than those found using experiments. Surprisingly, among this older population, patience is negatively correlated with education and numeracy. This goes against the positive correlation found for younger populations in experiments and some field studies. We discuss potential explanations for this result.

Pourquoi l’État intervient-il dans la sphère économique ? Quelles sont les justifications théoriques et les limites pratiques de cette intervention ? Quelle est la manière la plus efficace de financer l’action de l’État ? De quels outils dispose la puissance publique pour réguler les marchés ? Comment doit-elle organiser la production des services publics et le financement des assurances sociales ? Quels instruments peut-elle mobiliser pour lutter contre les inégalités économiques et quels sont les principaux arbitrages auxquels sont confrontées les politiques de redistribution ? Comment mesurer les bénéfices et les coûts des politiques publiques ? Cet ouvrage, réalisé par une équipe de chercheurs en économie sous la direction d’Antoine Bozio et Julien Grenet, s’efforce de répondre à ces questions en mobilisant les outils d’analyse de l’économie publique et en s’appuyant sur les résultats des études empiriques les plus récentes.

Ce papier vise à étudier la variabilité des coûts hospitaliers pour des séjours comparables en pathologies et en procédures (Groupe homogène de séjours _GHS). A l’époque du budget global, une forte variabilité des coûts était observée entre les hôpitaux publics français. Qu’en est-­‐il aujourd’hui ? La tarification à l’activité (T2A) mise en place entre 2004 et 2008, a introduit la concurrence entre les établissements hospitaliers français qu’ils soient publics, privés, à but non lucratif ou à but lucratif. Avec la T2A, les établissements sont désormais payés au forfait par séjour. Théoriquement, un mode de tarification par forfait devrait conduire les établissements à minimiser leurs coûts afin de gagner la différence entre le forfait et le coût. La mise en concurrence des établissements devrait accélérer ce mécanisme de minimisation des coûts. Nous montrons que si les changements majeurs dans les modes de régulation ont en effet conduit à une certaine homogénéisation des coûts et à une réelle prise en compte de l’hétérogénéité des individus, les forfaits par GHM ne capturent cependant pas toute l’hétérogénéité entre les établissements ni entre les patients.

Social security contributions (SSCs) are typically formally split between employers and employees as payroll taxes, levied on earnings at a constant tax rate that applies only up to a ceiling, above which the marginal tax rate falls to a reduced rate, often 0. Such contribution ceilings create a concave kink point in the budget set of workers and hence should generate a dip in the distribution of earnings around the ceiling through labour supply responses (the reverse of bunching expected at convex kink points) but such a dip is not observed empirically. This paper sets out a new approach to infer the incidence of SSCs that exploits the absence of this dip and the fact that (mechanically) the distributions of labour cost (earnings inclusive of all payroll taxes), gross earnings (net of employer payroll taxes) and net earnings (net of both employer and employee payroll taxes) cannot all be smooth around a kink. The other papers in this special issue apply the method to data for Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK and all find that distribution of gross earnings is smooth around kinks (implying that the distributions of labour costs and net-of-tax earnings are not) even though the concept of gross earnings is irrelevant in the standard static model of labour supply and demand that dominates the public economics literature. This suggests that other features of the labour market, such as wage bargaining based on the gross earnings concept, are relevant for determining the incidence of SSCs.