LORENZI Jean Herve

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The back cover states: "Technology as it develops today is the bearer of great hopes. But it is also intrusive, dominating and an instrument of confinement in codified and manipulated universes. Never in human history has technical progress given so many means to a few private actors - the GAFA or their Chinese equivalents, the BATX. They have been able to replace politics by imposing a new societal model, which is threatening our democracies. Faced with the digital and financial giants, a diffuse and plural resistance is developing. The solution will not only come from the States. Citizens, startups, hackers, NGOs are acting, collectively and in their most individual practices, to resist. They refuse to let their lives, their thoughts, their philosophical choices be controlled by some anonymous big data. This book does not aim to give the solution. But, beyond the catastrophist speeches, it traces the contours of the reaction movement that is emerging, and which opens a path towards a respectable and desirable future.

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This thesis aims to highlight the determinants of medical innovation and its effects on economic growth. It is based on the construction of a database of expenditures and consumption of health goods and services between 1980 and 2010, as well as on three theoretical models. The results, for cohorts born between 1923 and 2010, show that medical innovations are essentially determined by demographic variations. Moreover, even if these medical innovations have historically allowed the emergence of important economies of scale, they do not currently play a driving role in macroeconomic growth. Indeed, under the current conditions of stable survival curves, the mechanics of medical innovation do not appear to be a driving force for short-term macroeconomic growth. The multiplier effects of medical innovation on economic growth would therefore be negative or nil in the short term.

The objective of this thesis is to define the role of health care expenditures in the French health care system and, in particular, to identify the extent to which health care represents a cost or an investment. It is based on a study of the interdependencies between health care and sick leave for more than 100,000 employees monitored between 2009 and 2012. The results demonstrate the dual preventive and curative component of any care.Our first work consists in identifying the additional cost of care due to ill health, based on a model regressing the cost of care on the fact of having been absent in 2012: there is then a significant cost of this care assimilated to consumption.Based on a Poisson model with inflation of zeros, we then reflect on the determinants of sick leave, and in particular on the role of the sector of activity in a portfolio of private sector employees. It appears that while the difference in sick leave reflects working conditions, the disparity in duration is more akin to employment conditions and social climate.We also look at the preventive role of health care, since it significantly reduces the future number of days of sick leave, using a fish model on panel data that takes into account the problem of initial condition.Our final classification of health care utilization and sick leave behavior shows health capital as a continuum in which investments are made.

Japan is supremely well suited to the aphorism: ‘land of contrasts’. Japanese society has indeed experienced the fastest demographic ageing, due to its low birth rate and the exceptional longevity of its inhabitants. It is hard not to imagine a link between the very real weakening of an economy in the long term — a phase that has already lasted for twenty years — and the demographic impact so perfectly illustrated by Japan. The most surprising aspect of this intriguing development, which may represent both a positive and a negative, is the fact that the economic structure of this country reflects a dual constraint, one conjectural, the other structural. Firstly, there is an income distribution that would be hard to change and that favours capital over labour while blocking any increase in internal demand. Even worse, as the eminent Japanese demographer Shigesato Takahashi reminds us, ‘the decline in the rate of fertility is closely linked to the change in the work force […]. The number of young women in the job market has increased, especially in the service sector. […].

Political economy has always been correctly perceived as an intellectually autonomous discipline, independent in its objectives, solely aiming to represent, understand and possibly predict macro- and micro-economic changes in our societies. This has been the primary aim of well-known and lesser-known economists for three centuries. They have striven to answer the question of income distribution, one that occupies a central place in their approach and their analysis. It is necessary to represent this particularly complex subject as being some sort of pseudo-science and repeatedly attest to the either inevitable or unacceptable nature of the current systems of wealth distribution. In practice, some economists legitimize the rewards of capital while others denounce the exploitation and extortion of added value. When approached in this binary fashion, the theory of the redistribution of wealth questions society in moral and political terms before even mentioning its role in the vigour of economic growth. As far as we are concerned, it is thus a matter of rediscovering, through the economists’ train of thought, the basis for a solid analysis of the relationship between the level of inequality and that of growth. This is a regression that will definitely show that everything that appears to be set in stone as the natural order or the clearly expressed collective will, is actually extremely subjective and prey to the greatest uncertainty.

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Crises, what crises? They will certainly occur, and no mistake. This view is not restricted to the economists. How is it possible not to think of the philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and novelists who today, as they did yesterday, hold up to us the mirror of a modernity which, today as yesterday, has its share of shadow and evil? A violent modernity that is as destructive for the collective as it is for the individual. It is not by chance that Alain Touraine writes of ‘the end of societies’.1 They will be unable to survive the end of social life and the destruction of their institutions, the result of a financial capitalism that has broken off all its links to the industrial economy, with institutional, political and even cultural control of its resources. Touraine seeks to know how to escape the ‘chasm’ that is opening up in front of us, in this ‘post-social and post-historic’ era. While Touraine does not stop there, with this terrible discovery of globalization that is out of control — far from it — he opens the way to a new paradigm, he even leads us into an improbable rapprochement with Arjun Appadurai, someone who does not hesitate to stress the intimate, and even incestuous, relationship between globalization and violence.2 There are too many authors to list who are warning us against our contemporary deregulation, some speak of folly, such Ulrich Beck,3 who calls our societies ‘risk manufacturers’ in which fear predominates or Zygmunt Bauman who constantly lists the destruction of our ‘individualistic societies’ and many others.

We have now reached the heart of this book. Having discussed, successively, the serious breakdown of technical progress, the upsets due to ageing, the loss of economic substance in the countries of the OECD, and uncontrolled finance, these themes converge into what creates the balance of the world, the savings accrued by people on every continent and the investments that are the translation of their dreams. Are these savings enough to enable their ambitions to be achieved? We think not, at least not in the way that the balance between investment and savings has materialized in recent decades. Naturally, a new balance will emerge, the expression of the way in which these new constraints will be satisfied. The world will have changed, as will its economic trajectory.

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In this world currently under reconstruction, nothing seems more utopian — or more improbable — than the control or restriction of financial activity. It was the dream of the post-crisis years, the idea that political will could be imposed on all of the movers and shakers of the world of finance. The scenario was soon demolished by the weakness of the U.S. government that was incapable of finding any autonomy in relation to Wall Street. Today, the manifestations of the financial industry are without a doubt more complex and more extensive than they have ever been. For this simple reason, through globalization, finance has the ability to intervene, create and use available liquidity to an unprecedented extent. Yet our whole recent economic history has assigned a key role to the creation of liquid assets at a world, regional and national level as well as via the central banks. In fact, the present authors consider that liquidity is the key to the way in which finance has developed, thus showing the extent to which it would be impossible to imagine a world that was definancialized. Remember that the origin of the evil is to be found in the major imbalance in trades which is itself the product of massive transfers of business from the North to the emerging nations. Even if there is an intention to reduce the trade deficits created by the United States, the reality of deindustrialization of the OECD countries will have two consequences in practice.

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Most observers consider that the crisis began in 2007 and has experienced many vicissitudes ever since. Some hope it will resolve itself soon, others suggest analyses leading to different economic policy proposals. The only virtual consensus is in the name, ‘financial crisis’. The present authors do not see it that way, however. Of course, finance played a significant role, but it was fundamentally a crisis of the real economy. We believe that the crisis is the result of the massive transfer of business activity, between 1995 and 2005, from the developed countries to those countries which would become known as the emerging nations. This was the unprecedented phenomenon of deindustrialization of the rich countries and submission in the short term to the diktat of the western consumer, who was so greatly tempted by the low cost of consumption and investment. This is the period when it was enviously reported that one hour of Chinese labour cost 40 times less1 than the labour of an American or European having the same qualifications. This miracle needed to be exploited quickly without thinking too much about the consequences, i.e. the price to be paid for supporting the newly unemployed. It would result in an explosion in the costs of social welfare and, above all, the disintegration of the world economy in the face of the brutality of this unprecedented impact.

A strange destiny awaited the analysis of technical progress as produced by economists two centuries ago. The difficulty in measuring such progress is patent. In the context of an approach from the total factor productivity perspective, it depends on how a given country’s economy grows and the division of its business activities into sectors. Even more important is the fact that technical progress was conceived through the contemplation of a particular history, that of the Industrial Revolution, an expression developed by Adolphe Blanqui.1 An Industrial Revolution represents the passage of a society from one technical system to another, illustrated first and foremost by the original Industrial Revolution that occurred in the late nineteenth century, in which the steam engine, the iron and steel industry and extensive coal-mining defined just such a new technical system. Certain economists subsequently identified other major changes that they considered to be worthy of the definition of ‘Industrial Revolution’.

The objective of this thesis is to verify whether the baby-boomers are at the origin of a break in intergenerational equity in France. It is based on an application of the National Transfer Accounts method, which provides an age-specific measure of consumption, individual resources, savings and public and private transfers between 1979 and 2011. Projections are also made to the year 2060 using the MELETE model for public transfers received and disposable income. The results, which are established with regard to the main criteria of intergenerational justice, do not show a clear and generalized break in intergenerational equity, even if French society is characterized by certain inequities concerning the distribution of income from assets and the distribution of retirement pensions between generations. Moreover, this thesis provides results that are useful for understanding family solidarity in France. Over the last thirty years, the increase in the economic weight of donations and inheritances has coincided with a decrease in the weight of aid within households and a stability in the weight of aid between households. The result is that private transfers between households are less and less adapted to the needs of the beneficiaries, which is corroborated by a micro-econometric panel analysis that shows that events experienced by donors can trigger the payment of donations, unlike aid between households, which depends exclusively on events experienced by the recipients.

Where does globalization lead the economy? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors extend the insights of the economist Charles-Albert Michalet by analyzing the spaces of globalization: global finance, stock exchanges, world trade - that "imperialism in reverse" -, European protectionist pressures, and the globalization of intellectual property. It is also about understanding how the main actors of globalization, the States and the Firms, overcome and maintain the crisis. Indeed, the competition between states to attract foreign investors feeds this crisis despite national innovation policies. For their part, firms, whose strategies are now part of a global reorganization of industry and services, are accentuating the flow of relocations and the relocation of activities. At the same time, new firms from the "South" are bursting into the world. The labor force must thus adapt to a new situation that goes from the financialization of firms to the individualization of remuneration.

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The back cover states: "Where does globalization lead the economy? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors extend the insights of the economist Charles-Albert Michalet by analyzing the spaces of globalization: global finance, stock exchanges, world trade - that "imperialism in reverse" -, European protectionist pressures, and the globalization of intellectual property. It is also about understanding how the main actors of globalization, the States and the Firms, overcome and maintain the crisis. Indeed, the competition between states to attract foreign investors feeds this crisis despite national innovation policies. For their part, firms, whose strategies are now part of a global reorganization of industry and services, are accentuating the flow of relocations and the relocation of activities. At the same time, new firms from the "South" are bursting into the world. The labor force must adapt to a new situation that goes from the financialization of firms to the individualization of remuneration.

Investment in local low-carbon infrastructure is considered an important component of the fight against climate change. Climate regulation mechanisms (such as carbon offsetting) make project developers bear the risks related to the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: operational, technological or environmental monitoring and regulatory risks. We show that the environmental and economic efficiency of projects depends largely on the way these risks are shared between the different actors involved in the project. On a sample of landfill gas flaring projects financed by the Clean Development Mechanism, it is shown that the delegation of technology provision creates additional risks. Delegation of the development of project documentation according to formal UNFCCC rules and the separation of the landfill operation from the CDM project appear to be manageable through the implementation of risk sharing measures.

This thesis deals with the problem of financing innovation through venture capital. Venture capital markets play a key role in the financing of innovation. Indeed, venture capitalists are investors who specialize in financing young innovative companies that are at the cutting edge of technology and have a risky profile. These companies generate strong growth and create jobs at a sustained rate. We study the mechanisms that contribute to the success of venture capital markets and analyze their implications for the financing of innovative projects. A matching model between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with innovative projects allows us to understand the role of the venture capitalist's expertise in the financing of innovative projects and the proper functioning of venture capital markets. We then present a model of endogenous growth where the efficiency of the matching between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs influences the growth rate. We also analyze the role played by information asymmetry and, more specifically, the role of antiselection and its impact on the financing of innovative projects by venture capital. Finally, we ask what role the state can play in the development of venture capital markets.

How do liberalization policies - that is, opening up to competition and privatization - affect innovation in telecommunications? In order to answer this question, we first look at the regulation of network access, which is the main tool for promoting competition. In this area, our review of the literature highlights a contradiction between the desire to���increase social surplus given the existing infrastructure and the desire to promote the deployment of new networks. In a model that extends this work by focusing on geographic coverage, we show that an obligation to mutualize networks reconciles these two objectives better than controlling the access tariff. More generally, competition and privatization have contradictory effects on firms' investment. In our empirical study, it appears that the positive effects of competition outweigh its negative effects on average. It also appears that competition "through services" is less favorable to investment than competition "through infrastructure. Our second theoretical model nevertheless establishes that the latter affects the nature of R&D activities and increases the share of development at the expense of research. Based on a comparative study of French and Korean regulatory modes, we emphasize that, beyond the trade-offs made in the implementation of liberalization policies, their articulation with innovation support mechanisms is a fundamental determinant of technical progress in telecommunications.

LTC insurance for the elderly is an enigma in France and in many other developed countries (United States, Spain, etc.). Why has the LTC insurance market not developed further, when LTC represents a very significant financial risk for the elderly and public assistance is very inadequate in most countries? This thesis proposes an original study of the LTC market and provides a new answer to this enigma. It studies whether the market rationing is explained by reasons related to the functioning of markets (explanations most often retained by the literature) or whether this sub-optimal equilibrium is the result of more institutional reasons. This research leads to four results. In the first part, it shows, on the basis of original data, that it is possible to push back the frontier of insurability for LTC risk, particularly for home care. In the second part, we show that individual preferences may lead some agents not to insure themselves for at least two reasons: either because the product offered is not a fully insured product or because their actual or anticipated health status has a very strong effect on the valuation of their wealth. We also have a portfolio of insured individuals. The results obtained from these data, never before available in France, indicate that the LTC contract is destined to become a mass product, particularly appreciated by the working and middle classes. Finally, in the third part, standard tests conclude from our data that there is no anti-selection in the French LTC insurance market. This absence of anti-selection could be explained by compensation phenomena. From these four results, we can argue that the weak development of the French LTC insurance market is not explained by a market failure in the coverage of this risk but by more contextual and institutional reasons (criteria for the allocation of public aid, disadvantageous taxation compared to insurance contracts, etc. . ). However, a part of the population, because of its preferences, will rationally continue not to insure itself.

This thesis analyzes the origins and objectives of prudential regulation of insurance investments and its role in the allocation of insurers' savings. It is divided into three parts. The first part explains the importance of the insurance industry for the management of global savings and provides an understanding of the need for, nature of, and evolution of insurance solvency principles. These prudential norms were always developed with one objective in mind - to prevent failure by carefully measuring and controlling "risk. The second part deals with the negative role of these "single-factor" solvency standards on the allocation of savings. This historical analysis allows us to characterize capitalization as a source of motivation for investment reallocation and to examine the situation in this context in Europe before the introduction of Solvency II. The third part proposes a new theoretical framework for analyzing prudential investment regulation and explains theoretically why "single-factor" solvency standards influence insurers' investment policies. This final section proposes a new approach to investment regulation that has two objectives - risk control and optimal return. Based on the "two-factor" approach, we propose changes for Solvency II.

Insurance has always participated in the success of the global information infrastructure by offering guarantees against traditional computer risks resulting from physical damage. However, cyber risks present several "non-conformities" to the traditional actuarial model due mainly to the interconnection of information systems. The main contribution of the thesis is to identify the conditions that make cyber risks insurable following an economic approach of risk transfer. The study of the insurability dynamics based on a stochastic modeling of supply and demand behaviors has allowed us to identify two conditions necessary for the expansion of the insurability field: the increase of the cyber-risk aversion of the insureds, and the reduction of the probability of success of attacks. From these two conditions, we determined what might increase the former and reduce the latter. One solution is to better leverage the synergy between government and insurance companies in terms of compliance with cyber risk prevention regulations or guidelines by both potential policyholders and connectivity equipment and security service providers. From this research covering both theoretical and empirical aspects of our thesis, we were able to identify the conditions under which cyber risks could be the subject of an insurance contract. This is of great importance when it comes to the very survival of companies in an economic environment "reconfigured" towards an intensive but also unavoidable use of information networks.

The aim of the thesis is to establish the theoretical foundations of a security policy, and then to mobilize them in the particular case of crime risk. To do so, we first give an economic status to security, by conceiving it as a capability, in Sen's sense, and by subjecting it to an axiomatic. We then construct a "demand function" for security, which has two components: one is based on institutional evaluations . the other on agents' evaluation of risk, which we model in the framework initiated by Kahneman and Tversky. In the case of crime risk, whose historical evolution we first analyze, a security "supply function" is then constructed, based on a model of temporal allocation between legal and illegal activity. Thus, we can compare, first in a theoretical way, the supply and demand functions obtained. Then, a numerical application is carried out, allowing us to propose an allocation of public resources between two forms of expenditure intended for sensitive urban areas: education expenditure, on the one hand, and police expenditure, on the other.

Our dissertation work focused on the definition of the price of natural gas in Europe following the liberalization process: can it be defined via a market price and thus dispense with the traditional model of long-term contracts? We show that the sole use of a market price is not viable. The characteristics of the sector require the continued use of long-term contracts to ensure long-term security of supply. However, spot markets are essential for short-term security of supply and the definition of a price signal reflecting gas-to-gas competition. In order for them to play this role, we recommend removing the flexibility clauses from long-term contracts. We also show that these long-term contracts should be more closely linked to spot prices and illustrate this. Finally, we question the use of forward prices. This scheme reconciles the development of competition and security of supply.

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This thesis demonstrates that the Internet is at the origin of a new growth regime, i.e. a sectoral reorganization caused by a technological innovation responsible for two simultaneous phenomena: a break in the market's growth rate and the entry of new players made possible by a decrease in barriers to entry. We show that the Internet plays a role in the industry's record sales crisis. The Internet also allows for a decrease in search costs which results in a lowering of promotional barriers. We study the resulting sectoral reorganization by showing the evolution of power relations within the value chain. The economic models are modified and the point of control shifts towards the downstream part of the chain. This reorganization also upsets the balance of copyright between incentive to create and diffusion of knowledge. Economic solutions that aim to restore this balance are discussed.

Faced with the catastrophic nature of economic and social analyses of the consequences of demographic aging, we have undertaken to demonstrate the existence of a positive link between contemporary demographic aging and economic growth. The ambition of this work is to support the relevance of this statement with two arguments. First, that of a positive link between human capital and longer life expectancy, which is included in a concept that we have named -economic aging- whose purpose is to measure biological and professional life expectancy. Secondly, we show through the development of a theoretical model combining wage and productivity profiles and human capital accumulation, that the type of human capital accumulated is an important explanatory component of permanent cessation of activities, and of the functioning of the labor market.

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There is a new category of risk, called catastrophic risk, which refers to phenomena where the fear of a catastrophe creates real economic losses even if the catastrophe does not occur. SARS, BSE, GMOs, Y2K, are examples of these catastrophic risks. These phenomena are part of a general trend that is contemporary catastrophism and tend to multiply. Under certain conditions, we demonstrate that it is possible to insure companies against these risks by distinguishing the gap between the real phenomena of risk development and the media phenomena of panic associated with these risks.

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