GARY BOBO Robert

We would like universities to offer opportunities to their students, to remedy the massive failure in undergraduate studies, while continuing to democratize. But can we achieve these goals and keep higher education almost free? Government subsidies to universities, which are insufficient, are unlikely to increase much in the future. Australia and the United Kingdom have radically different models in place. They rely on high tuition fees coupled with a widespread system of student loans, the repayment of which is conditional on future earnings. Robert Gary-Bobo argues for a reform based on this model. It would give the means to develop to a French university in serious financial difficulty and which leads many students to a dead end. It would inject more social justice into a system that, paradoxically, benefits mainly young people from privileged backgrounds.

The author assesses the real impact of higher education on employment and inequality in France. Comparing this system with the Australian, English and American models, he proposes to improve the efficiency of universities by introducing individual funding of institutions.

We propose a quantitative analysis of the reform of the ratp special pension scheme, negotiated in 2007 and implemented by a decree in January 2008. We focus more specifically on the case of subway drivers. To evaluate the reform, we use the criterion of the real net actuarial cost of an agent per year of service. This cost is based on the calculation of the discounted sum of the real net salaries and pensions earned by a ratp employee during his or her life cycle, to take into account the social cost of retirement. The provisions of the reform, in a permanent regime, should make it possible to save public funds, but the introduction of this new regime is preceded by a long transitional period which will lead to an increase in costs and therefore, presumably, to some increase in public subsidies to the ratp regime. This transitional regime is not negligible, since it concerns all employees recruited before the reform. it preserves certain acquired advantages and offers compensation to employees. The reform is ultimately a transaction between the public authorities and the insiders, to the detriment of future employees. We maintain that a reform that protects the community from an increase in social costs would have been possible and acceptable.

In this thesis, I analyze the role of institutions in two areas of study: the labor market and the housing market. In Chapter 1 (with Elisa Guglielminetti), I present a randomized search model to explain the selection of new hires between short and long term contracts. Mining an Italian database, we find that the probability of obtaining a permanent contract increases with a stronger match between the worker's education and occupation. In Chapter 2, I explore the effect of liberalizing fixed-term contracts and find a negative effect on new permanent jobs. The results validate the simulations of the first chapter and confirm the role of match quality in firms' hiring choices. Chapter 3 (with Robert Gary-Bobo), studies the distribution of housing and real estate wealth between generations and, by finding an imbalance in favor of the oldest, identifies taxation instruments to correct it.

We study the treatment effect of grade retention using a panel of French junior high-school students, taking unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of grade repetitions into account. We specify a multistage model of human-capital accumulation with a finite number of types representing unobserved individual characteristics. Class-size and latent student-performance indices are assumed to follow finite mixtures of normal distributions. Grade retention may increase or decrease the student’s knowledge capital in a type-dependent way. Our estimation results show that the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of grade retention on test scores is positive but small at the end of grade 9. Treatment effects are heterogeneous: we find that the ATT of grade retention is higher for the weakest students. We also show that class size is endogenous and tends to increase with unobserved student ability. The average treatment effect of grade retention is negative, again with the exception of the weakest group of students. Grade repetitions reduce the probability of access to grade 9 of all student types.

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Universities present some similarities with professional partnerships in law and accounting. Universities are close to being partnerships in a non-profit environment. In particular, the practice of co-option for the appointment of new teachers is similar to partnership rules according to which a new partner cannot be appointed without the consent of all the other partners. We compare co-option with other recruitment procedures such as delegation of recruitment to headhunters or the sale of academic positions at auction. Asymmetries of information, reputation, joint production of teaching and research and externalities in academic production, explain that co-option is the commonly adopted way of hiring new faculty. Still, the incentives to recruit the best candidate are weakened by free-riding, moral hazard, and the fact that academics do not invest their own wealth in the university. We explore some ways of realigning incentives to recruit good candidates in the framework of a collective co-option procedure in French universities. We end up by concluding that the key factor to improve the situation lies in the institution of the university president, who should be chosen to be more independent from the academic senate. Classification JEL : I23, J54, D82, M51.

This thesis is devoted to the study of decision-making within couples and the analysis of educational choices by gender. To date, economic models offer a better understanding of these decisions, but fail to explain gender differences in their entirety. Indeed, traditional economic variables do not fully represent the allocation of time between partners, and human capital models fail to explain why girls choose lower paying educational paths. The first chapter of this thesis will then seek to better understand the determinants of "who gets what" in the couple, in terms of monetary resources and time. Then a second chapter will look at the production sphere of the household, by confronting the efficiency hypothesis to the time allocation choices in couples. It turns out that this hypothesis seems to be challenged at the level of the household production process. But how can we then represent behavior? It might be judicious to try to represent a second-order optimum, integrating social constraints or representations, and more particularly gender stereotypes or differentiated beliefs in society regarding the skills of men and women. The third chapter thus analyses the impact on educational choices of different beliefs about the skills of girls and boys in science and humanities. The final chapter examines the impact of gender stereotypes, this time concerning men's and women's skills in producing household goods.

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Using recent developments in microeconometrics, this thesis studies two key issues in education economics: grade repetition and class size. After a first chapter that discusses the econometric problems related to the specification and estimation of the education production function, chapter 2 estimates the effect of class size on the probability of moving from one year to the next in college. It models student pathways as a succession of transitions in which each student may pass, repeat or be referred. The identification strategy is based on the discontinuity rule of theoretical class size versus total grade size. The results show that class size has a negative effect on the probability of passage for the first two years of college. Chapter 3 estimates the treatment effect of repetition, using value-added score as the outcome and birth quarter as the instrument. We find that repetition is an effective measure that allows a student to catch up. Chapter 4 studies both questions from Chapters 2 and 3 simultaneously. It models learning as a process of human capital accumulation through the different stages of schooling. Unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account through a factor model allowing to construct the distribution of factual counterfactuals and therefore to estimate the marginal treatment effect of repetition and to simulate various public policy effects. This model is richer than those of the two previous chapters and confirms their results.

The first part of this work presents the main theories of distributive justice (utilitarianism, egalitarianism, equal opportunity theory), emphasizing their philosophical basis. However, it turns out that even if theorists of justice have been aware of the problems posed by the information necessary for the implementation of various ethical solutions, they have generally not adopted a forma♭ lise approach integrating informational issues. The second part of this thesis accordingly introduces the problems associated with asymmetric information alongside normative concerns. The formalized framework of implementation theory is presented, allowing♭ so much to introduce the revelation principle. The optimal mirrlees income taxation model is then presented, which was the first to mix informational and normative considerations by studying the influence of asymmetric information on the redistributive vocation of a tax scheme. Two theoretical essays are then presented, focusing on one of the main fields of public economics as an application framework: educa♭ tion. These contributions focus on the consequences of the presence of anti-selection on the main ethical solutions within the principal-agent paradigm. The analysis shows that optimal incentive management leads to a trade-off between equity and efficiency that constrains the implementation of an equal opportunity education policy. In particular, we show that the presence of anti-selection cou♭ plee to the existence of a strong social aversion to inequality reinforces the elitist character of the optimal education policy.

In this thesis, I discuss the use of surveys in the public decision-making process. Equally, I asked myself to what extent the use of surveys with agents who have private information is relevant in the construction of incentive mechanisms. I deal with different problems by adopting a sampling approach in order to highlight the economic issues related to the collection of information. Chapter 2 is devoted to a problem of quality regulation in an economy in which quality is jointly produced by an agent and the users of a public service. In this principal-agent-user structure, the use of a quality survey has a social value. Chapter 4 deals with a problem of revealing preferences for public goods. We construct a mechanism for public decision making that is simple in the sense that decisions about the level of production and cost sharing depend on information conveyed through consultation with a part of the population. Chapter 5 deals with the study of both a problem of preference revelation and of management or control of the quality produced exclusively by an agent. The quality regulation mechanism is based on two successive surveys: one on preferences for quality, the other on the quality actually achieved. The last chapter deals with a problem of regulation of local monopolies where the regulator acts in great ignorance in informational terms. This chapter proposes an analytical framework that is different from the Bayesian framework.