FOUGERE Denis

This study presents the results of a randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of a shared-book reading (SBR) intervention that targeted children aged 4 living in socially mixed neighborhoods of the city of Paris. We selected a large, random sample of families and provided parents with free books, information on the benefits of SBR and tips for effective reading practices. We measured SBR frequency and children’s vocabulary before and after this intervention, among treated and control children. The intervention had a large effect on SBR frequency. At the pre-test, SBR on a daily basis involved 41.2% of the families, and the treatment fostered this practice by 8 percentage points. SBR on a weekly basis was fostered by 14 percentage points. The intervention fostered SBR frequency only in low-educated households. This equalising impact is an important finding against the background of previous research reporting that disadvantaged families tend to benefit less from SBR programs. The intervention also significantly enhanced children’s language skills measured with standardized tests of receptive vocabulary. The effect size for the main treatment effect ranges from 0.12 at the post-test to 0.16 at the follow-up. Treatment effects are persistent six months after the end of the intervention. Children from low-educated and immigrant families improved their vocabulary as much as those from high-educated, native families. Moreover, the persisting positive impacts on vocabulary growth detected at the follow-up also involve children from disadvantaged families. Furthermore, these children more often attend schools with lower educational resources. It is therefore encouraging that the intervention has strong impacts in schools with initially low involvement in reading-related activities and with low educational resources.

Tempo is EDF's new real-time pricing option for domestic customers. With six very different energy prices, households have strong incentives to reduce or postpone their consumption when prices are high. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the substitution capabilities of consumers in the face of this new tariff configuration as well as their gain in terms of welfare or expenditure compared to other tariff options. After formalizing the consumer's behavior with flexible indirect utility functions, we present expenditure elasticities and price elasticities in the Allen-Uzawa and Morishima sense. The econometric evaluation of Tempo in terms of welfare allows us to sketch a natural segmentation of the customers according to their electrical equipment and their consumption habits.

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This study presents the results of a randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of a shared-book reading (SBR) intervention that targeted children aged 4 living in socially mixed neighborhoods of the city of Paris. We selected a large, random sample of families and provided parents with free books, information on the benefits of SBR and tips for effective reading practices. We measured SBR frequency and children's vocabulary before and after this intervention, among treated and control children. The intervention had a large effect on SBR frequency. At the pre-test, SBR on a daily basis involved 41.2% of the families, and the treatment fostered this practice by 8 percentage points. SBR on a weekly basis was fostered by 14 percentage points. The intervention fostered SBR frequency only in low-educated households. This equalizing impact is an important finding against the background of previous research reporting that disadvantaged families tend to benefit less from SBR programs. The intervention also significantly enhanced children's language skills measured with standardized tests of receptive vocabulary. The effect size for the main treatment effect ranges from 0.12 at the post-test to 0.16 at the follow-up. Treatment effects are persistent six months after the end of the intervention. Children from low-educated and immigrant families improved their vocabulary as much as those from high-educated, native families. Moreover, the persisting positive impacts on vocabulary growth detected at the follow-up also involve children from disadvantaged families. Furthermore, these children more often attend schools with lower educational resources. It is therefore encouraging that the intervention has strong impacts in schools with initially low involvement in reading-related activities and with low educational resources.

This paper proposes an evaluation of the pre-retirement consequences of a reform of the Frenchpension system that increased the minimum legal retirement age. Our empirical strategy relies onthe comparison of two groups of cohorts. The control group consists of cohorts not affected by theincrease in the minimum legal retirement age while the treatment group consists of cohorts bornlater. Using a sample of 38,652 high-school teachers, we identify the effect of increasing theminimum retirement age on short sick leaves (i.e., of less than three months) by comparingprobabilities to take at least one sick leave during a schooling year before retirement across thetwo groups. Estimates of panel data models show that teachers affected by the reform have anincreased probability to take short sick leaves before retirement. This is mainly due to teacherswho decide to retire at the minimum legal retirement age, while those who continue to work abovethe minimum retirement age do not increase the frequency of their short sick leaves beforeretirement. This last result is predicted by a theoretical model that analyzes the optimal retirementchoice over the life-cycle, and it is confirmed by using an empirical strategy that distinguishesteachers according to their retirement age.

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This chapter describes the main impact evaluation methods, both experimental and quasi-experimental, and the statistical model underlying them. Some of the most important methodological advances to have recently been put forward in this field of research are presented. We focus not only on the need to pay particular attention to the accuracy of the estimated effects, but also on the requirement to replicate assessments, carried out by experimentation or quasi-experimentation, in order to distinguish false positives from proven effects.

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"In continuous time processes, non causality and instantaneous non causality are defined, using respectively conditional independance and the Doob-Meyer decomposition. The relations between these two concepts are studied for the particular class of counting processes, with a special emphasis on bivariate survival models.".

Abstract Shared book reading (SBR) between parents and children is often regarded as a significant mediator of social inequalities in early skill development processes. We argue that socially biased gaps between parents in the awareness of the benefits of this activity for school success contribute to inequalities between children in access to this activity and in their language development. We test this hypothesis with a large-scale field experiment assessing the causal impact of an intervention targeting parents of pre-schoolers on both the frequency of SBR and the receptive vocabulary of children. Results indicate that low-educated parents are more reactive to this intervention, with significant effects on the language development of their children. We conclude that cognitive barriers and information gaps on the potential of informal learning activities at home fuel social inequalities in early childhood. At the same time, light-touch interventions removing these barriers are a cost-effective way of reducing these inequalities.

This thesis examines the determinants of wage inequality from a behavioral economics perspective. The first chapter analyzes students' orientation choices in higher education. Based on the content of motivation letters, we describe the evolution of their academic preferences and how they take into account information about their abilities in different subjects. The second chapter describes the results of an experiment studying income allocation preferences. We show that, behind the veil of ignorance, individuals largely favor greater inequalities when they are also more efficient. But when these inequalities do appear concretely, a quarter of the subjects prefer to reduce the amount allocated to the richest, even if this does not improve anyone's situation. The third chapter investigates how managers' distributional preferences affect the distribution of wages, based on survey data and an experiment. We show that managers have normative distributional preferences and are willing to pay to implement them. The fourth chapter analyzes the results of an online experiment on ethnic discrimination in the United States and Germany. We compare the characteristics of ethnic favoritism within each country. We show that disclosing information about the economic success of ethnic minorities reduces discriminatory behavior by the ethnic majority. However, this information may increase distrust between two people from the same minority.

Interventions that encourage parents to read with their pre-school aged children can be a cost-effective way to boost early childhood development and reduce educational inequalities. But socioeconomic and cultural barriers can hinder the efficacy of such interventions, and recent impact evaluations question their value. This column looks at a large-scale experiment that provided parents of pre-schoolers with books as well as materials on the benefits of shared reading. It finds that the accessibility of the information provided played a key role in the intervention’s success.

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Claudine Pirus MENJ-DEPP, Bureau des études statistiques sur les élèves 23 In education, peer effects result from the different types of interactions between students, within the same class or school. However, characterizing the nature and measuring the extent of these interactions poses substantial methodological problems. This article aims to present the difficulties of measuring peer effects in education, as well as the results of research on them in primary and secondary education. Within a school, students are influenced by the socioeconomic composition and academic level of their peers. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, or who are struggling academically, tend to be more susceptible to these effects. Because of such effects, segregation between and within schools is likely to exacerbate educational inequalities. However, research findings on peer effects are not consistent. M easuring and understanding the influence of our colleagues, friends and neighbors on our behaviour and socio-professional pathway is a theme that concerns several disciplinary fields and has been the subject of much research. Moreover, this theme raises important problems of statistical methodology. Indeed, while it is easy to show a correlation between a person's behavior (in terms of consumption, schooling, etc.).

In this paper, we investigate the effect of real estate prices on productive investment. We build a theoretical framework of firms' investment with credit rationing and real estate collateral. We show that real estate prices affect firms' borrowing capacities through two channels. An increase in real estate prices raises the value of the firms' pledgeable assets and mitigates the agency problem characterizing the creditor–entrepreneur relationship. It simultaneously cuts the expected profit due to the increase in the cost of inputs. We test our theoretical predictions using a large French database. We do find heterogeneous effects of real estate prices on productive investment depending on the position of the firms in the sectoral distributions of real estate holdings.

This paper describes, in a non-technical way, the main impact evaluation methods, both experimental and quasi-experimental, and the statistical model underlying them. In the first part, we provide a brief survey of the papers making use of those methods that have been published by the journal Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics over the past fifteen years. In the second part, some of the most important methodological advances to have recently been put forward in this field of research are presented. To finish, we focus not only on the need to pay particular attention to the accuracy of the estimated effects, but also on the requirement to replicate evaluations, carried out by experimentation or quasi-experimentation, in order to distinguish false positives from proven effects.

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From the end of the 1990s to the financial crisis, real estate prices in many advanced countries experienced a very strong expansion, unprecedented in terms of its magnitude and duration, raising questions among analysts about its impact on productive investment. In countries such as Spain, where property prices fell after a very sharp rise, the adjustment revealed a very poor allocation of capital and led to a rebalancing in favour of the export sector (Cette, Fernald and Mojon, 2016). In France, on the other hand, there was no significant correction in real estate prices. They have remained higher than in the 1990s in relation to consumer prices or equipment prices. That said, France also raises questions about the impact of the very strong expansion in property prices on sectoral allocation and productive investment (Askenazy, 2013). Has this expansion altered the allocation of investment, directing it towards less productive firms and sectors? The effect of real estate price increases on collateral is mitigated by a negative profitability effect. So far, the literature has mainly focused on the collateral channel. In an imperfect credit market, the deposit of collateral enhances firms' ability to borrow. The ability of lenders to capture deposited collateral increases borrowers' ability to borrow because it mitigates the effects of the principal-agent problem that characterizes this external financing relationship. The extent to which depositing collateral relaxes the credit constraint depends on the liquidation value of the collateral. Real estate assets often constitute the bulk of firms' collateralizable assets because they can be easily redeployed and have a long life.

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Denis Fougère is an economist and director of research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (OSC) at Sciences Po. He is co-director of the "Educational Policies" axis of LIEPP with Agnès van Zanten. He devotes his research to the evaluation of public policies, particularly those related to the labor market and the education system. He presents here a study that applies econometric methods to individual data to analyze the educational pathway of a cohort of middle school students who entered the sixth grade in 2007.

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This paper examines empirically the dynamics of wage floors defined in industry-level wage agreements in France. It also investigates how industry-level wage floor adjustment interacts with changes in the national minimum wage (NMW hereafter). For this, we have collected a unique dataset of approximately 3200 industry-level wage agreements containing about 70,000 occupation-specific wage floors in 367 industries over the period 2006Q1-2017Q4. Our main results are the following. Wage floors are quite rigid, adjusting only once a year on average. They mostly adjust in the first quarter of the year and the NMW shapes the timing of industry-level wage bargaining. Inflation but also changes in past aggregate wage increases and in the real NMW are the main drivers of wage floor adjustments. Elasticities of wage floors with respect to these macro variables are 0.6, 0.4 and 0.3 respectively. Inflation and the NMW have both decreasing but positive effects all along the wage floor distribution.

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This thesis is composed of four chapters that focus on different aspects of real estate markets. The first chapter considers real estate as a financial investment. We analyze the influence of real estate on households' portfolio choices and more precisely on the share of risky assets held. We distinguish between the effect of net housing wealth and the effect of housing debt and obtain two effects of opposite signs. The second chapter analyzes real estate as a durable good and seeks to explain its price formation on the basis of its own characteristics as well as those of its environment. The third chapter evaluates the impact of an increase in transfer taxes that took place between 2014 and 2016 in France on real estate volumes and prices. The effect of this reform was a decrease in transaction volumes only in the least tense areas, suggesting a very strong inelasticity of demand in tense markets. Moreover, the increase in the tax was entirely borne by the buyer, regardless of the degree of market tension. The fourth chapter is an analysis of the effects of the Zones Franches Urbaines (localized subsidy program) on real estate prices. The empirical results suggest that the implementation of these zones has had an inflationary effect on commercial real estate and to a lesser extent on residential real estate. Moreover, this inflationary effect is driven by zones with low real estate supply elasticity.

The first chapter reviews the literature on partial activity and introduces the three research questions developed in this thesis, namely the local diffusion of the use of partial activity in France over the period 2003-2014, the effect of partial activity on employment in France during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and the effect of the 2012-2013 reforms of partial activity and the recurrent use of this device on aggregate output in France. In the second chapter, we highlight the local diffusion of the use of partial activity in France over the period 2003-2014. To do so, we evaluate the effect of the geographical proximity of establishments that have already resorted to partial activity in the past on the use of partial activity by an establishment for the first time over the period 2003-2014. Indeed, we argue that the information available to establishments about the scheme and its procedure, particularly through neighboring establishments, is a key determinant of partial activity use. Our stylized facts reveal that the use of partial activity is geographically concentrated and that this concentration has a dynamic character. We use a spatial concentration index (based on inter-establishment distances) as a measure of the local diffusion of partial activity information and take into account the other characteristics of establishments in order to distinguish the effect of this transmission of information from other determinants of the use of the system and thus highlight its impact on the use of partial activity by an establishment for the first time. Our results show the importance of the local diffusion of information on partial activity, that this diffusion decreases in the first few kilometers and that this information is transmitted both within a given sector and between sectors.In the third chapter, we evaluate the effect of partial activity on employment in France during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. We develop a theoretical model according to which the effect of partial activity varies according to the financial situation of firms. For firms facing a strong decrease in turnover, partial activity allows to safeguard employment, while for firms with a moderate decrease in turnover, partial activity leads to a decrease in hours worked without preserving employment. These contrasting theoretical effects are confirmed by our empirical results, which show that partial activity reduced the number of jobs destroyed only in the case of a significant reduction in turnover, but had no significant effect on employment for the other firms, which account for around 40% of partial activity users. These windfall effects, although considerable in relation to the partial activity scheme, remain negligible compared to other measures such as wage and hiring subsidies. Moreover, partial activity has not contributed to keeping alive companies in structural difficulties. Partial activity was therefore an effective means of safeguarding employment in France during the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

Among the methods used to evaluate educational policies, randomized experiments, also known as controlled experiments, are currently of particular interest. In the field of education, randomized experiments can be used to evaluate the effects of a pedagogical innovation, a modification of school rhythms, the introduction of support courses, etc., even before such interventions are generalized or not. Advocates of experiments often point to the statistical biases inherent in evaluations conducted with non-experimental observational data, and in particular to selection biases, which controlled experiments can reduce.

The work presented in this thesis focuses on the individual returns to education and training, and seeks to identify more effective ways in which public intervention can increase these returns. The first two chapters of this work explore how returns to individual investments in education can be maximized by improving the efficiency of education and vocational training systems. The final study examines the links between human capital investment and the legal or economic environment that frames it. The first article of this thesis focuses on the effect of enrollment in a French private school in CP and CE1 on academic performance in CE2. The second chapter aims to measure the effectiveness of certification training for French job seekers on their return to employment. The last study shows the link between the flexibilization of the English labor market and access to training for employees. The analyses carried out are based on microeconometric methods which aim to identify the causal effect of the public policies studied. We thus use the instrumental variables method and the difference-in-differences method. This thesis also relies on the estimation of duration models, using the timing-of-events method or estimating a bivariate competing risks model.

The boom of the 2000s in France stimulated investment by firms with significant real estate holdings (positive collateral channel). Conversely, it was unfavourable to investment by younger firms, with fewer holdings, because of the induced cost (negative profit channel), which justifies the current attention given to the financing of SMEs.

Ethnic and social diversity is at the heart of the debate on the French school system. This article first summarizes international studies on the effects of the presence of children of foreign origin in the classroom. It then presents how this question can be examined using the 2007 panel of secondary school students compiled by the DEPP. The latter contains several measures of school performance, information on the national origin and socio-economic characteristics of students, and on the number of foreign students in secondary school classes. The gross negative correlation between the concentration of foreign children in classes and the scores of students in these classes on cognitive tests taken in the sixth and third grades is greatly reduced, or even cancelled out, by introducing control variables or fixed effects.

This study approaches the comparison between public and private schools from two perspectives. The first is to better understand the choice of sector at the beginning of elementary school (CP and CE1). This choice differs according to the family environment, the proximity of a private school to the home, and the level of the student at the beginning of CP. The second aims to judge the effectiveness of the private sector in helping students succeed. A direct comparison of results between the two sectors is not relevant, as their students do not have the same characteristics. To account for these differences, we use information collected from the panel of students who entered the first grade in 1997. The difference in distance to the parents' home between the nearest private and public schools is used as an instrumental variable. Overall, we find no significant effect of private school attendance in CP and CE1 on the results at entry into CE2, in mathematics as well as in French, nor on the probability of repeating the first and second grade.

In light of the Eurozone Crisis, some countries have implemented reforms to collective wage bargaining institutions, which can be responsible for wage rigidities that are problematic in the face of rising unemployment. This column describes collective wage bargaining in France and how national minimum wage increases are transmitted to wage floors set by industry-level agreements. An increase in the national minimum wage leads to an increase in negotiated industry-level wage floors, which firms then use as references for their wage policy. This might partly explain why French base wages have continued to increase despite recent rising unemployment.

This paper examines empirically how industry-level wage floors are set in French industry-level wage agreements and how the national minimum wage (NMW) interacts with industry-level wage bargaining. For this, we use a unique dataset containing about 48,000 occupation-specific wage floors, in more than 340 French industries over the period 2006-2014. We find that the NMW has a significant impact on the seasonality and on the timing of the wage bargaining process. Inflation, past sectoral wage increases and real NMW increases are the main drivers of wage floor adjustments. elasticities of wage floors with respect to these macro variables are 0.6, 0.3 and 0.25 respectively. Wage floor elasticities to inflation and to the NMW both decrease along the wage floor distribution but are still positive for all levels of wage floors.

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We estimate the impact of international trade on wages using data for French manufacturing firms. We instrument firm-level trade flows with firm-specific instrumental variables based on world demand and supply shocks. Both export and offshoring shocks have a positive effect on wages. Exports increase wages for all occupational categories while offshoring has heterogeneous effects. The impact of trade on wages varies across bargaining regimes. In firms with collective bargaining, the elasticity of wages with respect to exports and offshoring is higher than in firms with no collective bargaining. Wage gains associated with collective bargaining are similar across worker categories.

Real estate is often the most important financial asset of households. But it is also a durable consumer good, for which transaction costs, both at the time of acquisition and at the time of sale, are high. This dual characteristic invites us to assess the influence of real estate investment on the composition of households' financial portfolios. To do this, we attempt to identify two effects of opposite sign: a so-called "wealth effect" and a real estate risk effect. The increase in real estate wealth leads to a more risky financial portfolio, while real estate risk tends to reduce the ownership of risky assets. To separate these two effects, an indirect method proposed by Chetty and Seizdl (2010) is used: the wealth effect is captured by changes in housing wealth net of outstanding loans and the risk effect is captured by changes in its gross value. The hypothesis is that an increase in net wealth at a given level of gross wealth corresponds to an increase in the household's housing wealth without changing its degree of exposure to housing risk. Its effect will therefore measure a pure wealth effect. However, the approach poses a problem of endogeneity: the households that own the largest real estate assets and have the least need to incur debt are generally the richest, and therefore those that take the most financial risk. This problem is solved by instrumenting net and gross wealth with the price changes observed at the departmental level. In this way, we obtain the two expected opposite effects: the wealth effect tends to increase the share of risky assets in the portfolio, while the real estate risk effect tends to decrease this share. According to our estimates, the wealth effect is more important than the property risk effect.

We estimate the impact of international trade on wages using detailed data for French manufacturing firms. We instrument firm-level trade flows with firm-specific instrumental variables based on world demand and supply shocks. Both export and offshoring shocks have a positive effect on wages. Exports increase wages similarly for all occupational categories while offshoring has heterogeneous effects. The impact of trade shocks on wages is heterogeneous across bargaining regimes. In firms with collective bargaining, the elasticity of wages with respect to both exports and offshoring is higher than in firms with no collective bargaining. The wage gains associated with collective bargaining are similar across worker categories.

The acceleration of the firm failure rate in France between 2008 and 2010 was preceded by a surge in the number of firms’ creations in 2003-2004. Therefore, identifying the impact of the 2008 crisis requires to distinguish, among the failures occurring over the period, those resulting from the crisis from hose mechanically stemming from firm demography, as we know that many firms disappear during their first years of existence. Our study was conducted using the universe of firms created between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2007. This sample is extracted from the database managed by the Companies Direction at Banque de France. The lack of complete information on firms created before 2000 led us to restrict the sample to newly created firms, but the period under study is long enough to encompass the increase in the number of firm creation in 2003-2004. The originality of this study lies both in the sample size and in the richness of the data used. Our statistical analysis focuses on the period between the date of the firm creation and of its first failure. The impact of the crisis is estimated using a flexible duration model, stratified according to the date of creation. The model takes into account the effects of the company age at the failure date, its industry, its size and the sequence of dates associated with its payment incidents on trade bills. We examine more specifically the failure rates in four industries: retail trade, transport, manufacturing and construction. The proportion of failures due to the crisis varies greatly across these four sectors. On average, the impact of the 2008 crisis has been of 27% in retail trade, 35% in transports, 43% in manufacturing and 46% in construction. Younger firms, namely those created in 2006 and 2007, were the most affected by the crisis.

This thesis consists of four articles, mainly empirical, on discrimination in the labor market. The first article focuses on the employment and wages of French people of North African origin, the second on their wages and access to managerial status, the third on the heterogeneity of their employment gaps, and the fourth uses data from a test designed to measure the impact of a prison background on access to employment in the United States. The added value of these articles is twofold. First, they provide new empirical evidence on the labor market situation of French people of foreign origin: employment and wage gaps with the reference population are high, but once differences between populations (age, education, etc.) are taken into account, most of the wage gaps disappear. On the contrary, a substantial part of the differences in employment and in the proportion of managers remains. Moreover, we propose an original description of the heterogeneity of employment gaps which shows that these gaps are relatively large for individuals whose employment rates would be the lowest in the reference population, while for those whose theoretical employment rates are higher these unexplained gaps are much smaller. Second, these articles provide methodological elements for measuring discrimination. The first three articles attempt to incorporate ideas and notations used in the public policy evaluation literature. The fourth attempts to shed light on the methods usually used in testing studies.

In France, business creators have a vast array of public financial aid at their disposal. Some of them are superimposed, others replace each other. Although the average amounts granted are relatively small, the total amount of funds involved is considerable. How can we measure the effectiveness of this public aid? Does it allow the development of innovative and profitable activities? Does it encourage the establishment of companies in disadvantaged areas or the long-term exit of job seekers who receive it? Shouldn't it be complemented by training prior to entrepreneurship and support for the young company for two or three years? In order to provide a concrete and empirical answer to these questions, the book reviews the main public aid schemes offered in France and offers a summary of the evaluations of the schemes implemented in France and abroad.

This thesis is composed of four chapters that can be read independently. Each of the chapters focuses on a particular moment in the trajectories of French youth through the education system to their entry into the labor market and their transition to employment. Throughout these trajectories, individuals orient themselves in the school system and make occupational choices. This work focuses on understanding these choices and the impact they may have on the future of individuals. Although each of these works is autonomous, they all focus on explaining inequalities in the school and labor market of young people in France and on characterizing how these are linked. The thesis contributes to economic research by asking original questions about the individual decisions that young people make during their life course and by answering these questions with empirical methods adapted to the problem and the available data.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the empirical links between social housing policy and location choices of immigrants in France. Design/methodology/approach – The study characterizes the main individual and contextual determinants of the probability of immigrants to live in a HLM (habitations à loyer modéré), which is the main public housing policy in France. The authors use individual information coming from large (one-fourth) extracts of the French population censuses conducted by INSEE (Paris) in 1982, 1990, and 1999. Findings – In general, migrants live more frequently in social housing than French natives, other observables being equal. In particular, this frequency is higher for migrants from Turkey, Morocco, Southeast Asia, Algeria, Tunisia and Sub-Saharan Africa (in decreasing order). Moreover, migrants of all origins live less often in a HLM when the city has plenty of social housing and when the fraction of natives is high. Research limitations/implications – The dataset can only measure statistical association between location choices of immigrants and the supply of social housing units at the local level, in the absence of panel data and instrumental variables. Interpretation in terms of causality is thus not permitted. Originality/value – The dataset used is especially valuable for studying location choices of immigrants, since it allows significant samples of immigrants, according to their country of origin, these groups being generally too small in (French) surveys.

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.

Using several unique data sets on wage agreements at both industry and firm levels in France, we document stylized facts on wage stickiness and the impact of wage-setting institutions on wage rigidity. First, the average duration of wages is a little less than one year and around 10 percent of wages are modified each month by a wage agreement. Data patterns are consistent with predictions of a mixture of Calvo and Taylor models. The frequency of wage change agreements is rather staggered over the year but the frequency of effective wage changes is seasonal. The national minimum wage has a significant impact on the probability of a wage agreement and on the seasonality of wage changes. Negotiated wage increases are correlated with inflation, the national minimum wage increases and the firm profitability.

In France, business creators have a vast array of public financial aid at their disposal. Some of them are superimposed, others replace each other. Although the average amounts granted are relatively small, the total amount of funds committed is considerable. How can we measure the effectiveness of this public aid? Does it allow the development of innovative and profitable activities? Does it encourage the establishment of companies in disadvantaged areas or the long-term exit of job seekers who receive it? Shouldn't it be complemented by training prior to entrepreneurship and support for the young company for two or three years? In order to provide a concrete and empirical answer to these questions, the book reviews the main public aid schemes offered in France and offers a summary of the evaluations of the schemes implemented in France and abroad.

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In France, business creators have a vast array of public financial aid at their disposal. Some of them are superimposed, others replace each other. Although the average amounts granted are relatively small, the total amount of funds involved is considerable. How can we measure the effectiveness of this public aid? Does it allow the development of innovative and profitable activities? Does it encourage the establishment of companies in disadvantaged areas or the long-term exit of job seekers who receive it? Shouldn't it be complemented by training prior to entrepreneurship and support for the young company for two or three years? In order to provide a concrete and empirical answer to these questions, the book reviews the main public aids offered in France and proposes a synthesis of the evaluations of the systems put in place in France and abroad. (Editor's summary).

This doctoral thesis aims to contribute to the debate on the origin of ethnic discrimination, by focusing on the population of African immigrants in France and on that of African-Americans in the United States. Specifically, by analyzing French and American microeconomic data, it identifies the existence of discrimination based on the principle of employer and consumer preferences and their effect on the weakening of the economic situation of these two minority groups. It establishes the importance of indirect discrimination on the part of consumers, and suggests that it is essential to know the origins of ethnic discrimination in order to establish public policies capable of effectively combating this phenomenon. The first chapter offers a descriptive analysis of the access of working people according to their geographical origins to customer-facing jobs in France. It shows that immigrants in France, and African immigrants in particular, have less access to jobs in contact with the public. In order to analyze whether consumers play a role in this underrepresentation, the second chapter formulates a test strategy to distinguish between consumer and employer discrimination. The existence of these two sources of discrimination against African immigrants is then proven through the use of the French population census. Using the previous test strategy, the third chapter reveals the presence of this source of discrimination against African-Americans in the United States.

The objective of this thesis is to study different methods of predicting business failure in both static and dynamic approaches. More precisely, in the static approach, we have resorted to the methods of selection of the discriminating variables by using neural networks. The first one, based on the HVS criterion, entitled HVS-AUC, allowed us i) to build a more parsimonious model compared to the ADL . ii) to identify a set of stable variables that are both non-cyclical and with a high explanatory power. In contrast, the second technique is based on the forward procedure or, more precisely, on forward-AUC. This method produces results comparable to the LDA but with fewer explanatory variables. We also used Bayesian network structure learning methods to try to improve the classification performance of the companies. We mobilized a technique called "Max-Min Hill-Climbing" or MMHC. We analyzed the classification performance of a combined algorithm between MMHC and the basic model of a naive Bayesian network (BN). This new method has been named BN-MMHC (Naive Bayes augmented by MMHC). In the second dynamic approach, we put more emphasis on factors that cannot be measured a priori and on explanatory factors that cannot be understood in a static framework. In the first part, we mobilized macroeconomic variables to better estimate the risk of default. In the second part, we used an alternative model that allows us to correctly assess the shocks that firms may experience over time. In this way, we have evaluated the effect of the propagation of these shocks.

The objective of this thesis is to shed quantitative empirical light on the phenomena of discrimination against the descendants of immigrants in the labor market and the residential segregation of immigrants on French territory. The main results are as follows. The wage gap between French people of French parents and those of African parents is almost entirely explained by a human capital gap between the two groups. Conversely, these differences in human capital do not explain the large gap in employment probability. When controlling for the influence of place of residence, the unexplained component of the employment gap decreases but remains substantial. This thesis also provides results on the location, geographic concentration and residential segregation of immigrants and their children. In particular, a method for decomposing wage gaps that takes selection into account as well as a method for decomposing employment gaps that takes place of residence into account are proposed. A new method for correcting the bias of segregation indices using units with few observations is also introduced and validated. Finally, a non-parametric kernel estimation method is used to compute the local proportion of a minority in the territory. A concentration index using directly these estimated proportions is also developed.

This thesis contains four essays related to the microeconometric analysis of the demand for post-secondary education. It examines the educational choices of high school graduates from several perspectives, each of which provides the material for a chapter in this thesis. The first two chapters examine the determinants of these educational choices, analyzing the decision to pursue higher education and the choice of a university track, respectively. These chapters both highlight the major influence of non-pecuniary factors in the process of choosing post-secondary education. The third and final chapter focuses on the related issue of financing higher education through the lens of multiple jobholding and its effect on educational attainment.

The transition to a market economy and accession to the European Union have profoundly changed the structure and functioning of the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. This thesis proposes an analysis of the evolutions observed in the regional and national labor markets of the new EU member states as well as an evaluation of the public policies implemented in this context of economic transition. The analysis of the matching process between workers and employers reveals the importance of labor demand in the creation of new hires in Latvia, Slovenia and Estonia and underlines the need to integrate flows (unemployed and vacant jobs) and spatial effects in the modeling. The effectiveness of public policies is documented at the macro and micro levels and demonstrates the positive influence of training programs on unemployment exit rates and the employability of participants.

This thesis proposes new results on nominal rigidities in France. Chapter 1 provides a synthesis of the work comparing microeconomic models of price rigidity with microeconomic results. Chapter 2 characterizes, with the help of simple statistics, the rigidity of producer prices in France using the individual price surveys used to construct the producer price index. Chapter 3 examines the impact of the minimum wage on restaurant prices by estimating a tobit model on individual consumer price data. The minimum wage has a positive and significant impact on both the decision and magnitude of price changes. Nominal rigidities explain the slow adjustment of prices. Chapter 4 shows the crucial role of bargaining on price rigidity. Ial of bargaining on wage rigidity using an endogenous regimes model estimated on individual wage bargaining data in France.