Public job creation and labor market performance.

Summary The thesis project was born out of the observation of the facts, undecided about the direction of causality between public employment and unemployment rates. Macroeconomic data indicate that within OECD countries, public employment and unemployment have evolved in parallel over time. Estimating more than complete crowding out, the literature has favored a public employment-unemployment causality. The first part of the thesis shows that taking into account the specificities of public and private negotiations in the analysis enriches the reflection on crowding out and on the means to mitigate it. In chapter 1, the modeling of the specificities of the public labor market allows us to study the competition between sectors to attract workers and the possibility of decentralizing the social optimum. Within the framework of a wage bargaining model, and using panel data estimation, chapter 2 shows that centralizing wage bargaining corrects for fiscal extemalities in the financing of public employment. The second part gives meaning to the unemployment-public employment causality by placing the analysis at the heart of the transitory dynamics of the labor market. In chapter 3, within the framework of a dynamic matching model, the modeling of private job creation and destruction flows counters the traditional wage pressure result and accounts for the asymmetric behavior of job flows in response to an increase in public employment. Outside the steady state, public employment reduces unemployment. In chapter 4, a structural vector auto-regression model allows us to empirically illustrate our results.