Personal services in France: a descriptive study and three public policy evaluations.

Summary This thesis presents a descriptive study and three evaluation tests on the topic of personal services. The first chapter describes the main characteristics of employees and households using personal services and their evolution. After a review of the available data, it examines, in particular, the multiple activities of employees, the evolution of "undeclared" work by households and the activity of women in user households. The next two chapters assess the effect of two tax measures on the use of home-based workers: the introduction in 1991 of the tax reduction for the employment of home-based workers and its partial transformation into a tax credit in 2007. The last chapter looks at the effect on mothers' activity of an increase in childcare allowances, applied in France in 2004 as part of the reform of the Prestation d'Accueil du Jeune Enfant. To evaluate these public policies, which use survey data as well as tax data, econometric techniques of matching and difference-in-differences, as well as a combination of these two methods, are used.