CHERON Arnaud

This thesis explores the implications of technical progress and labor taxation on employment performance in France and the United States over the past four decades. Chapter 1 assesses the extent to which differences in socio-demographic and occupational structures between countries explain the French employment deficit. This deficit reflects not only a deficient labor market, but also a reallocation of work that affects the employment prospects and participation decisions of specific sociodemographic groups. Chapter 2 examines the determinants of unskilled employment performance in France between 1982 and 2008. Technical progress and labor taxation policies are key to understanding the deterioration of unskilled employment. The reallocation of unskilled labor from routine jobs to manual jobs induced by technical progress is partly hindered by the presence of the non-market sector. Labor taxation interacts with technical progress by changing the value of unskilled jobs relative to non-market labor. Chapter 3 studies the implications of routine technology shocks on economic fluctuations between 1989 and 2017 in the United States. It assesses their impact by estimating a structural VAR model. Technology shocks biased against routine tasks explain the recessionary effects of technology shocks on hours worked. These shocks appear quantitatively relevant and generate recognizable business cycle fluctuations.

The interplay between growth and public debt is addressed considering a Barro-type (1990) endogenous growth model where public spendings are financed through taxes on income and public debt. The government has a target level of public debt relative to GDP, and the long-run debt-to-GDP ratio is used as a policy parameter. We show that when debt is a large enough proportion of GDP, two distinct balanced-growth paths (BGPs) may coexist, one being indeterminate. We exhibit two types of important trade-offs associated with self-fulfilling expectations. First, we show that the lowest BGP is always decreasing with respect to the debt-to-GDP ratio while the highest one is increasing. Second, we show that the highest BGP, which provides the highest welfare, is always locally indeterminate while the lowest is always locally determinate. Therefore, local and global indeterminacy may arise and self-fulfilling expectations appear as a crucial ingredient to understand the impact of debt on growth, welfare, and macroeconomic fluctuations. Finally, a simple calibration exercise allows to provide an understanding of the recent experiences of many OECD countries.

No summary available.

The objective of this thesis is to study the contractual dualism existing in the French labor market.I am interested in the flows taking place in the French labor market by highlighting the importance of fixed-term contracts in these flows.French employment protection legislation seems a priori to be clear and concise and firms are subject to strict rules regarding the management of their labor force.However, it would seem that in practice, the constraints on firms in terms of the use of temporary contracts are not so clear and that the vision of the open-ended contract as a "normal" form of employment relationship is not so obvious for firms. Indeed, we observe that their use is very frequent and concerns jobs of increasingly short duration. The objective of this thesis is therefore to better understand the functioning of the French labor market and the impact of contractual dualism. To this end, this thesis is composed of three chapters. The first chapter assesses the magnitude of job and worker flows over the period 1998-2012 by highlighting the impact of the 2008 crisis on these flows as well as the potential strengthening of contractual dualism after this date.I take into account sectoral specificities by isolating the sectors authorized to use so-called contracts of use in order to study the behavior of firms in terms of hiring in these particular sectors.I also detail the evolution of these job and worker flows as a function of firm size. In addition, I study the evolution of the duration of fixed-term contracts over this same period. Finally, I implement an econometric model to shed light on the main determinants of fixed-term contract hiring. In the second chapter, I measure the state-to-state transitions taking place in the French labor market and their impact on the volatility of the unemployment rate. For this purpose, I use a three-state model (employed, unemployed, inactive) as well as a four-state model (permanent contract, fixed-term contract, unemployed, inactive) allowing to take into account the contractual dualism characterizing many European labor markets. This type of four-state model is a real novelty in the sense that it has never been implemented for France. Finally, the third article aims to analyze the consequences of the introduction of a tax on fixed-term contracts in order to encourage firms to hire more permanent employees and to increase the duration of contracts. This measure has recently been introduced in various forms in several European countries. For France, this tax was introduced by the National Interprofessional Agreement signed in 2013.To do so, a matching model is estimated on French data from UNEDIC relying on the model proposed by Cahuc, Charlot and Malherbet (2016).

We propose an original analysis of the impact of supplementary health insurance on the behaviour of workers and firms in the labour market. The first chapter explains theoretically the wage and health investment policies chosen by the firm when the latter only imperfectly observes the employee's health status and when the health investment can lead to productivity gains via a better health status. We show that both policies are dependent on the firm's productivity. The second chapter explains the reasons why the joint supply of supplements and wages differs according to the structure of the firm. We show that VSEs and more generally firms subject to greater financial constraints do not offer coverage, as this is generally linked to the employment contract of the highest paid employees. The third chapter empirically analyses the impact of complementary health insurance on workers' health status. Being covered (relative to being uncovered) does not significantly improve health status. Similarly, access to group coverage (relative to individual coverage) does not result in a significantly improved health status. The last chapter analyses the absenteeism behaviour of workers under the effect of group supplementary insurance. The presence of a group contract induces the presence of moral hazard on short work stoppages when the worker belongs to small firms with low compensation for work stoppages.

No summary available.

No summary available.

Searching for partners involves informational persistence that reduces future traders’ matching probability. In this article, traders who are no longer available but who left tracks on the market are called phantoms. We examine a dynamic matching market in which phantoms are a by-product of search activity, no coordination frictions are assumed, and non-phantom traders may lose time trying to match with phantoms. The resulting aggregate matching technology features increasing returns to scale in the short run, but has constant returns to scale in the long run. We embed a generalized version of this matching function in the canonical continuous-time equilibrium search unemployment model. Long-run constant returns to scale imply there is a unique steady state, whereas short-run increasing returns generate excess volatility in the short run and endogenous fluctuations based on self-fulfilling prophecies.

The ageing of populations in developed economies appears to be a major issue in which employment is at the center of all concerns. It also influences the balance of their social protection system. This thesis focuses on the low employment rate of French seniors, represented by the over-50s, compared to other European countries. The shift in public policy towards seniors from a logic of exclusion to one of inclusion in the labor market in the 2000s has led to a slow and limited improvement in their employment rate. While other European countries have also been affected by the change in policies, it is legitimate to question the reasons for their moderate impact in France.This thesis is organized around two complementary parts. The first part states the weakness of the employment rate of seniors in France compared to its European neighbors (chapter one). This weakness is reflected in an occupational segregation that increases with age, which leads to difficulties in the orientation of older men in certain sectors and certain occupations within these sectors. Other avenues of reflection on the supposed reasons for this low employment rate of older men are also considered in a review of the literature (chapter two). These reasons come from several fields: the structural field and the characteristics of labor supply and demand, which illustrates the complexity of the problem for public authorities. The second part of the paper attempts to measure a persistent factor in the underemployment of seniors, even when all the objective reasons for which recruiters' preferences are less inclined to hire seniors are neutralized: age discrimination in hiring (and gender discrimination in some specific cases). Two types of methods and data are used to measure the residual part of the differences in the probability of being employed or of access to employment (of which discrimination is one of the components): decomposition methods on survey data, giving a measure qualified as objective (chapter three) with an extension analyzing the link between this residual part and the economic situation, and the methodology of correspondence tests, or testing, on experimental data collected on a selection of occupations in tension (chapter four). The first method shows a large residual part of the probability gap, suggesting high risks of age and gender discrimination. The comparison of the job access rates of the second method conducted on nearly 6,000 applications illustrates these risks according to which seniors have less chance of accessing a job interview compared to younger people with similar characteristics. We will see the different explanatory hypotheses of the underemployment of seniors, documented by the literature, such as the short distance to retirement, the obsolescence of skills in a situation of technological shocks, the social norms of gender (through professional reconversion) and age (through the exogenous preferences of recruiters).One of the guiding threads of the thesis is to distinguish the situation of senior men and women in terms of employment. There are clear differences throughout this thesis, with men's situation more problematic than that of their female counterparts in terms of the employment rate gap, occupational segregation, and hiring discrimination.

This paper examines life cycle vocational training investments in the context of a model with search frictions. We emphasize that related externalities are agedependent, and this can require an hump-shaped subsidy rate of training costs to restore social efficiency. These results are illustrated using a calibration on the french economy.

In this study, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the interactions between human capital investment, economic turbulence, and the life cycle and examine the dynamics of social externalities related to general education. The existence of such externalities leads to the exclusion of some workers from the vocational training system, which is wrong from the point of view of what would be socially desirable. It is therefore necessary to propose a policy of support for training targeted at certain types of workers. The main contribution of this paper is to position this problem of the social externalities of continuing education in the perspective of the worker's life cycle, and to emphasize the need for an age-dependent training incentive policy. We show that employers tend to increase their criteria for access to continuing education too early in the life cycle of workers, relative to what would be suggested by the consideration of social externalities. On the other hand, at the very end of the career (approaching retirement) the social return converges towards the private return to training and tends towards zero. On balance, this argues for an incentive policy that is not monotonous with age, increasing up to a certain age and then decreasing thereafter.

In this paper, we develop a matching model where firms invest in transferable human capital. Workers are endowed with heterogeneous abilities and, as a result of economic turbulence, can undergo a depreciation of their human capital during unemployment spells. Firms take inefficient training decision because they do not fully valuate the additional productivity of the workers in future jobs (poaching externality) and the additional employability after separation (unemployment externality). Higher turbulence reduces the former externality and increases the latter. It then generates some opposite forces on the gap between efficient and equilibrium training, so that it does not necessarily require higher training subsidies. The general equilibrium analysis shows that, even if the Hosios condition holds, unemployment is higher than its efficient level, which requires an additional instrument such as ability-specific employment subsidies. We lastly run some computational experiments based on the French economy to illustrate these results: optimal subsidies are found to increase with turbulence, and the total subsidy turns out to be decreasing with wages, with an efficient rate that is reduced by three from the lowest to the highest wages.

This paper develops an equilibrium search model that allows rms to invest in worker's health. Heterogeneous health endowment of the employee is not observed by the employer, and rms also dier regarding their productivities. We emphasize that wage and health expenditure policies of the employer are tightly related, and show how those policies relate to rms' type. A noticeable implication is that there is an ambiguous relationship between wage earnings and health expenditures supported by firms.

This thesis proposes an analysis of educational investment at the individual level. It develops a dynamic perspective that seeks to analyze the links between education and trajectories over the long term. To do so, we use a dynamic microsimulation model. The first part of the thesis focuses on initial education. It seeks to assess the impact of the diversity of trajectories on the heterogeneity of monetary gains associated with different levels of education. We first show that some graduates, because of the unfavorable trajectories they experience on the labor market, have a non-negligible probability of not financially valuing their education. The analysis of the gains from initial education is then extended to individuals' marital behavior. In particular, we show that taking into account the wage income of spouses reduces inequalities between graduates, despite the existence of educational homogamy phenomena. The second part of the thesis is devoted to "continuing education" (CE) or "post-school". Taking into account family and professional factors that may affect access to CE, this part aims to measure the level of expenditure that individuals receive for training once they have completed their initial studies. The results highlight a high degree of heterogeneity in this expenditure and the divergent role of the various training schemes. They also show that the amounts invested in the post-school training of individuals remain low compared to those invested in initial training.

This paper extends the job creation--job destruction approach to the labor market to take into account a deterministic finite horizon. As hirings and separations depend on the time over which investment costs can be recouped, the life-cycle setting implies age-differentiated labor-market flows. While search by the unemployed falls with age, the separation rate is rather U-shaped over the life cycle. Worker heterogeneity in the context of undirected search implies an intergenerational externality, which is not eliminated by the Hosios condition. We show that age-specific policies are required to attain the first-best allocation.

The central theme of this thesis is the relationship between training and layoff decisions, and the economic efficiency of these decisions. Training is understood here as firm-specific training from which employees benefit during their working life via their employer. The first chapter assesses, on the basis of individual data, the returns to training in France, both in terms of mobility (job-to-job and job-to-unemployment) and in terms of wage gains. The second chapter examines how employment protection, differentiated according to the age of employees, affects the willingness of entrepreneurs to train their workers. The third chapter shows that training and job destruction decisions are strongly complementary. Therefore, training subsidies targeted by skill level and combined with taxes on layoffs (also targeted by skill level) must be put in place for these decisions to be socially optimal. The fourth chapter analyzes how the risk of dismissal, differentiated between workers of the same skill level according to their skill level, can be a source of wage inequality. Finally, the last chapter stresses that, in the face of wage, training and layoff risk disparities between workers of the same skill level, training subsidies and layoff taxes, which are necessary for economic efficiency, should not only differ by socio-professional category, but also within each one.

This thesis proposes a new theory to explain wage dispersion, emphasizing the role of labor market frictions as well as job-to-job transition flows. The structure of the thesis is organized as follows. In the first chapter, we review new developments in job search theory and focus on a fundamental question in labor economics: why are workers paid differently? In chapter 2, we compare the implications of the job search equilibrium model with French data on two dimensions: wage dispersion and transition rates. We use data from the 1990-1999 Employment Survey. In chapter 3, we model the job search theory to give an alternative explanation to the dispersion of equilibrium wages. We re-inspect the role of endogenous search effort in an environment where all workers and firms are identical. In Chapter 4, we examine the impact of the firm on equilibrium wage dispersion and, in particular, on the probability of job-to-job transition.

The purpose of this thesis is twofold: to propose a theory that can explain the dynamics of the labor market, and then to derive some policy recommendations from this theory. To this end, we identify four stylized facts as characteristic of fluctuations in employment, hours worked and the real wage. These facts are assumed to be representative of labor market dynamics. The first two parts of the thesis, each consisting of two chapters, are devoted to the positive study of the functioning of the labor market. Chapter 1 assesses the ability of a canonical Walrasian model to replicate the stylized facts identified. The quantitative results suggest that the representation of labor market equilibrium as the intersection of competitive supply and demand does not explain the dynamics of the labor market. Chapter 2, on the other hand, shows that the introduction of the matching hypothesis between unemployed persons and job vacancies is sufficient to understand the dynamics of employment. Chapter 3 compares different modes of non-competitive wage setting, individual bargaining and the efficiency wage, and concludes that in order to reproduce real wage fluctuations, the bargaining hypothesis must be retained, while proposing theoretical foundations for the rigidity of households' external opportunities. Chapter 4 thus shows that the existence of a costly transition for households through unemployment satisfies this criterion and allows the decentralized wage bargaining matching model to account for the four stylized facts representative of labor market dynamics. The final, normative part of the thesis also consists of two chapters. Chapter 5 shows that there is indeed a place for state intervention to simultaneously reduce unemployment and increase household welfare. Two competing employment subsidy policies are then considered in chapter 6: we show that the payment of hiring subsidies to firms is preferable to the payment of an employment allowance to workers.