Forty years of analysis of work and employment: views of four economists.

Summary We compare the changes in the French labor market over the last 40 years with the changes in the way it is viewed by official statistics and labor economists. One salient feature is that labor economics has taken an empirical turn by mobilizing the new micro-econometric methods of public policy analysis developed since the 1990s. This turn has not been sufficient to make decisive progress in the fight against unemployment or inequalities in the labor market. In turn, one may wonder about the difficulties of the discipline and its statistical tools in understanding a changing context, but also perhaps about the still insufficient dialogue with public policy makers.