ALGAN Yann

This paper studies how economic incentives influence cultural transmission, using a crucial expression of cultural identity: Child naming decisions. Our focus is on Arabic versus Non-Arabic names given in France over the 2003-2007 period. Our model of cultural transmission features three determinants: (i) vertical (parental) cultural transmission culture. (ii) horizontal (neighborhood) influence. (iii) information on the economic penalty associated with Arabic names. We find that economic incentives largely influence naming choices: Would the parental expectation on the economic penalty be zero, the annual number of babies born with an Arabic name would be more than 50 percent larger.

This study examines the link between behavior in kindergarten and adult-life welfare receipt. Teacher-rated behavioral assessments were obtained for inattention, hyperactivity, aggression-opposition, anxiety, and prosociality when children (n=2960) were aged 5-6 years and linked to their tax return records from age 18-35 years. We used group-based based trajectory modeling to identify distinct trajectories of welfare receipt and multinomial logistic regression models to examine the association between behaviors and trajectory group membership. The child's sex, IQ, and family background were adjusted for. Four trajectories of welfare receipt were identified: low (n = 2,390, 80.7%), declining (n = 260, 8.8%), rising (n = 150, 5.2%), and chronic (n = 160, 5.4%). Relative to the low trajectory, inattention and aggression-opposition at age 6 years were associated with increased risk of following a declining, rising, and chronic trajectory of welfare receipt, independent of hyperactivity and anxiety. Prosocial behaviors were independently associated with a lower risk of following a chronic trajectory. This study shows that kindergarten children exhibiting high inattention and aggression-opposition and low prosocial behaviors may be at increased risk of long-term welfare receipt in adulthood. The implications for early screening, monitoring, and prevention are discussed.

Online peer production communities such as Wikipedia typically rely on a distinct class of users, called administrators, to enforce cooperation when good faith collaboration fails. Assessing one’s intentions is a complex task, however, especially when operating under time-pressure with a limited number of (costly to collect) cues. In such situations, individuals typically rely on simplifying heuristics to make decisions, at the cost of precision. In this paper, we hypothesize that administrators’ community governance policy might be influenced by general trust attitudes acquired mostly out of the Wikipedia context. We use a decontextualized online experiment to elicit levels of trust in strangers in a sample of 58 English Wikipedia administrators. We show that low-trusting admins exercise their policing rights significantly more (e.g., block about 81% more users than high trusting types on average). We conclude that efficiency gains might be reaped from the further development of tools aimed at inferring users’ intentions from digital trace data.

We examine the dislocation from the traditional left-right political axis in the 2017 French election, analyze support for populist movements and show that subjective variables are key to understanding it. Votes on the traditional left-right axis are correlated to ideology concerning redistribution, and predicted by socio-economic variables such as income and social status. Votes on the new diagonal opposing “open vs closed society” are predicted by individual and subjective variables. More specifically, low well-being predicts anti-system opinions (from the left or from the right) while low interpersonal trust (ITP) predicts right-wing populism.

This paper studies how economic incentives influence cultural transmission, using a crucial expression of cultural identity: Child naming decisions. Our focus is on Arabic versus Non-Arabic names given in France over the 2003-2007 period. Our model of cultural transmission features three determinants: (i) vertical (parental) cultural transmission culture. (ii) horizontal (neighborhood) influence. (iii) information on the economic penalty associated with Arabic names. We find that economic incentives largely influence naming choices: Would the parental expectation on the economic penalty be zero, the annual number of babies born with an Arabic name would be more than 50 percent larger.

Social trust is at the center of democratic societies but it varies considerably between individuals and societies, which deeply affects a range of prosocial behaviours. Socioeconomic status has been identified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status taken in adulthood, recent studies have found unique effects of harsh conditions experienced during childhood on social trust assessed decades later. Here, we report a series of three studies that provide further support for the long-lasting association between early childhood conditions and social trust. The first study revealed that higher childhood socioeconomic status was associated with greater social trust in a diverse sample of French participants (N=915), even after adjusting for current socioeconomic status. The second study replicated this result using data from the European Values Study, an independent large-scale survey of 46 European countries (N=66,281). Finally, the last study found a similar association between socioeconomic status and willingness to invest in a trust game (N=60 in original study, N=75 in replication study).

Since its inception four years ago, the Observatoire du bien-être has taken on the mission of examining the well-being of the French. This report aims to provide a picture of this activity, and in so doing, to paint a portrait of France through the prism of subjective well-being. First of all, work plays an essential role in satisfaction, not only because of the income it provides, but also because of the social relationships it creates and the meaning it gives to individual activity. It is especially through the professional sphere that the level of education contributes to satisfaction. Unfortunately, we note that in the field of work, perhaps more than in any other, the famous "French happiness deficit" is expressed through a higher level of dissatisfaction than among our European neighbors. This is perhaps why, unlike in many countries, the transition to retirement does not seem to be a difficult turning point in France, likely to cause a drop in well-being, even if it does result in a loss of income. For the unemployed, it even represents an exit from precariousness and stigma, which is clearly favorable to well-being. Secondly, social and private ties, the importance of which can be gauged by the particularly deleterious feeling of loneliness that is expressed in certain French municipalities. Indeed, it is in areas of demographic decline, where social life is receding, that we have recently seen signs of strong discontent: dissatisfaction, electoral abstention, and Yellow Vests demonstrations. All in all, the French rank worse than other Europeans on a large number of subjective measures of well-being despite a much less unfavorable situation in terms of objective indicators. We see this as a sign of a worried society, uncomfortable with the transformations that are taking place. Perhaps also, in a centralized society where much is expected of the state, it is particularly distressing to see the national scale largely overtaken by the scale of global change. The last chapter of this book adds historical depth to the analysis, and suggests that the notion of crisis, which appeared in the mid-1970s, has taken root in French society, along with the pessimism and dissatisfaction that accompany it. These observations, made over the past few years, take on new meaning in light of the Covid-19 crisis. While the government faces a difficult trade-off between fighting the epidemic and the economy, it is also gradually becoming aware of the need to preserve the well-being and mental health of the population.

OBJECTIVES: To test associations between onset of formal child care (in infancy or as a toddler), high school graduation, and employment earnings from ages 18 to 35 years. METHODS: A 30-year prospective cohort follow-up study, with linkage to government administrative databases (N =3020). Exposure included formal child care, if any, by accredited caregivers in centers or residential settings at ages 6 months and 1, 1.5, 2, 3, and 4 years. A propensity score analysis was conducted to control for social selection bias. RESULTS: Of 2905 participants with data on child care use, 59.4% of male participants and 78.5% of female participants completed high school by age 22 to 23. Mean income at last follow-up (n = 2860) was $47 000 (Canadian dollars) (SD = 37 700) and $32 500 (SD = 26 800), respectively. Using group-based trajectory modeling, we identified 3 groups: formal child care onset in infancy (∼6 months), formal child care onset as a toddler (after 2.5 years), and never exposed. After propensity score weighting, boys with child care started in infancy had greater odds of graduating than those never exposed (odds ratio [OR] 1.39. 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.18–1.63. P < .001). Boys attending child care had reduced odds of low income as young adults (infant onset: OR 0.60 [95% CI: 0.46–0.84. P < .001]. toddler onset: OR 0.63 [95% CI: 0.45–0.82. P < .001]). Girls’ graduation rates and incomes revealed no significant association with child care attendance. CONCLUSIONS: For boys, formal child care was associated with higher high school completion rates and reduced risk of adult poverty. Benefits for boys may therefore extend beyond school readiness, academic performance, and parental workforce participation.

What are the costs of inflation fluctuations and who bears those costs? In this paper, we investigate this question by means of a quantitative incomplete-market, heterogenous-agent model wherein households hold real and nominal assets and are subject to both idiosyncratic labor income shocks and aggregate inflation risk. A key feature of our analysis is a nonhomothetic specication for households' preferences towards money and consumption goods. Unlike traditional specications, ours allows the model to reproduce the broad features of the distribution of monetary assets (in addition to being consistent with the distribution of nonmonetary assets). Inflation risk is found to generate significant welfare losses for most households, i.e., between 1 and 1.5 percent of permanent consumption. The loss is small or even negative for households at the very top of the productivity and/or wealth distribution.

Social trust is at the center of democratic societies but it varies considerably between individuals and societies, which deeply affects a range of prosocial behaviours. Socioeconomic status has been identified as an important predictor of such variability. Although this association has mostly been reported for measures of socioeconomic status taken in adulthood, recent studies have found unique effects of harsh conditions experienced during childhood on social trust assessed decades later. Here, we report a series of three studies that provide further support for the long-lasting association between early childhood conditions and social trust. The first study revealed that higher childhood socioeconomic status was associated with greater social trust in a diverse sample of French participants (N=915), even after adjusting for current socioeconomic status. The second study replicated this result using data from the European Values Study, an independent large-scale survey of 46 European countries (N=66,281). Finally, the last study found a similar association between socioeconomic status and willingness to invest in a trust game (N=60 in original study, N=75 in replication study).

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.

In the Funding section, the grant number from the funder European Research Council is missing. The correct funding information is as follows: This research was funded by CEPREMAP and the European Research Council. Yann Algan received financial support for this work from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program under European Research Council Consolidator Grant no. 647870. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Populism is the product of two earthquakes. First earthquake: the rise of an immense resentment against political parties and institutions. Faced with the failure of the right and the left to contain the excesses of capitalism, the "anti-system" radicalism has shattered the compromises that both camps had managed to build. Second earthquake: the end of class society, in favor of a society of individuals thinking their social position in subjective terms. A new polarity results, separating the "trusting" from the "distrustful" towards others. The populist right emerges at the crossroads of a double distrust - of political institutions and of society. It thrives on democratic disenchantment, while renewing the left-right divide. Based on unpublished data, this book is essential for understanding the present and future of democratic societies. Yann Algan is Dean of the School of Public Affairs and Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. Elizabeth Beasley is an economist and researcher at the CEPREMAP Welfare Observatory, and former director of J-PAL France. Daniel Cohen is Director of the Economics Department at the École normale supérieure and Professor at the Paris School of Economics. Martial Foucault is Director of the CEVIPOF (CNRS) and a university professor of political science at Sciences Po.

We study how social interaction and friendship shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, the cradle of top French politicians. We exploit arbitrary assignments of students into short-term integration groups before their scholar cursus, and use the pairwise indicator of same-group membership as instrumental variable for friendship. After six months, friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by one third of the standard deviation of opinion gap. The evidence is consistent with a homophily-enforced mechanism, by which friendship causes initially politically-similar students to join political associations together, which reinforces their political similarity, without exercising an effect on initially politically-dissimilar pairs. Friendship affects opinion gaps by reducing divergence, therefore polarization and extremism, without forcing individuals' views to converge. Network characteristics also matter to the friendship effect.

Background Childhood disruptive behaviors are highly prevalent and associated with adverse long-term social and economic outcomes. Trajectories of welfare receipt in early adulthood and the association of childhood behaviors with high welfare receipt trajectories have not been examined. Methods Boys (n = 1000) from low socioeconomic backgrounds were assessed by kindergarten teachers for inattention, hyperactivity, aggression, opposition, and prosociality, and prospectively followed up for 30 years. We used group-base trajectory modeling to estimate trajectories of welfare receipt from age 19–36 years using government tax return records, then examined the association between teacher-rated behaviors and trajectory group membership using mixed effects multinomial regression models. Results Three trajectories of welfare receipt were identified: low (70.8%), declining (19.9%), and chronic (9.3%). The mean annual personal employment earnings (US$) for the three groups at age 35/36 years was $36 500 (s.d. = $24 000), $15 600 (s.d. = $16 275), and $1700 (s.d. = $4800), respectively. Relative to the low welfare receipt group, a unit increase in inattention (mean = 2.64. s.d. = 2.32, range = 0–8) at age 6 was associated with an increased risk of being in the chronic group (relative risk ratio. RRR = 1.16, 95% CI 1.03–1.31) and in the declining group (RRR = 1.13, 95% CI 1.03–1.23), after adjustment for child IQ and family adversity, and independent of other behaviors. Family adversity was more strongly associated with trajectories of welfare receipt than any behavior. Conclusions Boys from disadvantaged backgrounds exhibiting high inattention in kindergarten are at elevated risk of chronic welfare receipt during adulthood. Screening and support for inattentive behaviors beginning in kindergarten could have long-term social and economic benefits for individuals and society.

The rise of antisystem forces and populism testifies to a deep trust crisis of citizens, both towards their institutions and others, as we show in a new book “The origins of populism” (with D. Cohen, E. Beasley, M. Foucault). The votes for antisystem parties is fueled first and foremost by a sharp deterioration of citizens’ trust in their institutions, experts and elites over the last three decades. According to the World Values Survey, the share of people who do not trust Parliament has increased from 47% to 77% in the United States, from 37% to 64% in France, and from 60% to 77% in Britain since the early 80s. [First paragraph].

Importance: Identifying early childhood behavioral problems associated with economic success/failure is essential for the development of targeted interventions that enhance economic prosperity through improved educational attainment and social integration. Objective: To test the association between kindergarten teacher-rated assessments of inattention, hyperactivity, opposition, aggression, and prosociality in boys with their employment earnings at age 35 to 36 years as measured by government tax return data. Design, Setting, and Participants: A 30-year prospective follow-up study analyzing low socioeconomic neighborhoods in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Boys aged 5 to 6 years attending kindergarten in low socioeconomic neighborhoods were recruited. Teacher-rated behavioral assessments were obtained for 1040 boys. Data were collected from April 1984 to December 2015. Analysis began January 2017. Main Outcomes and Measures: Mixed-effects linear regression models were used to examine the association between teacher ratings of inattention, hyperactivity, opposition, aggression, and prosociality at age 6 years and individual earnings obtained from government tax returns at age 35 to 36 years. The IQ of the child and family adversity were adjusted for in the analysis. Results: Complete data were available for 920 study participants (mean age at follow-up was 36.3 years). Mean (SD) personal earnings at follow-up were $28865.53 ($24103.45) (range, $0-$142267.84). A 1-unit increase in inattention (mean [SD], 2.66 [2.34]. range, 0-8) at age 6 years was associated with decrease in earnings at age 35 to 36 years of $1295.13 (95% CI, -$2051.65 to -$538.62), while a unit increase in prosociality (mean [SD], 8.0 [4.96]. range, 0-20) was associated with an increase in earnings of $406.15 (95% CI, $172.54-$639.77). Hyperactivity, opposition, and aggression were not significantly associated with earnings. Child IQ was associated with higher earnings and family adversity with lower earnings in all models. A 1-SD reduction in inattention at age 6 years was associated with a theoretical increase in annual earnings of $3040.41, a similar magnitude to an equivalent increase in IQ. Conclusions and Relevance: Teacher ratings of inattention and prosociality in kindergarten boys from low socioeconomic neighborhoods are associated with earnings in adulthood after adjustment for hyperactivity, aggression, and opposition, which were not associated with earnings. Interventions beginning in kindergarten that target boys' inattention and enhance prosociality could positively impact workforce integration and earnings.

This work proposes for the first time to study the hidden cleavages of support for the Yellow Vests using data from the CEVIPOF Confidence Barometer survey. We show that support for the movement ratifies the erasure of the traditional right-left axis. The Yellow Vests bring together people whose life satisfaction rates are very low, regardless of their agreement on the means to respond. They are mostly former voters of Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon or abstentionists (in that order). They share a more radical critique of the state and the government than either of these electorates, while having more middle-of-the-road positions on moral issues such as tolerance of minorities. The analysis of the geography of the traffic circles confirms the original character of this movement. The North-East and the South-West are the strong points of the mobilization, that is to say the two regions where Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon made their best scores in 2017.

The 4th cover says: "Populism is the product of two earthquakes. First earthquake: the rise of an immense resentment against political parties and institutions. Faced with the failure of the right and the left to contain the excesses of capitalism, the "anti-system" radicalism has shattered the compromises that both camps had managed to build. Second earthquake: the end of class society, in favor of a society of individuals thinking their social position in subjective terms. A new polarity results, separating the "trusting" from the "distrustful" towards others. The populist right emerges at the crossroads of a double distrust - of institutions and of society. It thrives on democratic disenchantment, while renewing the left-right divide. Based on unpublished data, this book proves to be essential for understanding the present and the future of democratic societies".

The Yellow Vests movement has introduced many questions about territorial inequalities into the public debate. This Note aims to analyze the local determinants of discontent among a part of the population. We study five characteristics of local living conditions: employment, local taxation, private and public facilities, real estate, and associative ties. We measure the evolution of these dimensions within each commune over the last few years and analyze their predictive power on three symptoms of discontent: the mobilization of the Gilets jaunes, the variation of the abstention rate during the presidential elections, as well as the discontent declared by the citizens.

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There is considerable variation in health and reproductive behaviours within and across human populations. Drawing on principles from Life History Theory, psychosocial acceleration theory predicts that individuals developing in harsh environments decrease their level of somatic investment and accelerate their reproductive schedule. Although there is consistent empirical support for this general prediction, most studies have focused on a few isolated life history traits and few have investigated the way in which individuals apply life strategies across reproductive and somatic domains to produce coordinated behavioural responses to their environment. In our study, we thus investigate the impact of childhood environmental harshness on both reproductive strategies and somatic investment by applying structural equation modeling (SEM) to cross-sectional survey data obtained in a representative sample of the French population (n = 1015, age: 19 – 87 years old, both genders). This data allowed us to demonstrate that (i) inter-individual variation in somatic investment (e.g. effort in looking after health) and reproductive timing (e.g. age at first birth) can be captured by a latent fast-slow continuum, and (ii) faster strategies along this continuum are predicted by higher childhood harshness. Overall, our results support the existence of a fast-slow continuum and highlight the relevance of the life history approach for understanding variations in reproductive and health related behaviours.

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Chapter 1 examines the role of home culture on how young men and women differ in their choices to delay leaving the parental home. I show that in cultures characterized by traditional gender role values, young men have more incentives than young women to stay at home. When women from these cultures move to a more gender-role liberal society, they leave home sooner and seek husbands from a different culture. In the second chapter, we show, based on CV testing, that young people with low qualifications are less likely to be recalled by private sector employers if they are North African than if they are French. However, the origin of the candidates has no effect on the recall rate in the public sector, even though recruiters in both sectors have similar discriminatory preferences. Our model shows that the absence of discrimination at the invitation for an interview in the public sector is compatible, in this context, with a higher discrimination at the hiring stage. Chapter 3 also uses CV testing to study the effects of work experience for high school dropouts four years after leaving school. In the absence of certification training, the recall rate is not higher for those who have had work experience, subsidized or not, in the market or non-market sector than for those who remain unemployed. Moreover, certification training improves recall rates only when the local unemployment rate is low.

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This chapter discusses the role of trust for social progress and people’s well-being. It reviews the different definitions and types of trust, including rational trust, moral trust and social preferences, as well as the state of existing statistics on trust. The chapter argues in favour of the definition of trust provided by the OECD Guidelines on Measuring Trust as “a person’s belief that another person or institution will act consistently with their expectations of positive behaviour”. It looks at why trust matters for the well-being of people and the country where they live, and assesses the available evidence on its role in supporting social and economic relations. It analyses trust between individuals (inter-personal trust) and trust in institutions (institutional trust) as determinants of economic growth, social cohesion and well-being, as a crucial component for policy reform and for the legitimacy and sustainability of any political system. Finally, the chapter stresses the importance of integrating survey measures of trust into the routine data collection activities of National Statistical Offices, and of implementing quasi-experimental measures of trust and other social norms based on representative samples of the population as a complement to traditional survey questions.

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"The only introductory economics textbook that allows students to address the major issues of our time by mastering the conceptual and empirical tools of contemporary economics. Editions Eyrolles has partnered with the teachers and researchers of the international collaborative project CORE to bring students a book and teaching system that complements and enriches the CORE online and open access eBook. Economics: is a new approach that incorporates recent advances in economics, including contract theory, strategic interactions, behavioral economics, and financial instability . leads students to seek answers to the problems of inequality, climate change, economic instability, wealth creation, among others . offers a joint treatment of microeconomics and macroeconomics . accompanies all models and concepts with data and case studies developed from real-world situations." [source: 4th cover].

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Although the educational results of young French people are in line with the OECD average, France is characterized by a strong divide between, on the one hand, an elite that excels and, on the other, students who accumulate difficulties, with a strong social determinism. In addition, every year, 100,000 young people leave the school system without a diploma.France's budgetary effort in favor of education. (First lines).

Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people's leader preferences are partly driven by early signals of harshness. We experimentally elicited children's (Study 1) and adults' (Study 2) political preferences using faces controlled for dominance and trustworthiness and showed that early childhood harshness has an enduring effect on adult political attitudes. Importantly, this effect was further confirmed using self-reported extreme authoritarianism (Study 2) and by the analysis of the large database of the European Value Survey (Study 3). We discuss the potential political implications of this early calibration of leader preferences.

We study the implications of the Great Recession for voting for anti-establishment parties, as well as for general trust and political attitudes, using regional data across Europe. We find a strong relationship between increases in unemployment and voting for non-mainstream, especially populist parties. Moreover, increases in unemployment go in tandem with a decline in trust in national and European political institutions, while we find much attenuated effects of unemployment on interpersonal trust. The correlation between unemployment and attitudes towards immigrants is muted, especially for their cultural impact. To advance on causality, we extract the component of increases in unemployment explained by the pre-crisis structure of the economy, in particular the share of construction in regional value added, which is strongly related both to build-up and the burst of the crisis. Our results imply that crisis-driven economic insecurity is a substantial driver of populism and political distrust.

We study the implications of the Great Recession for voting or antiestablishment parties, as well as for general trust and political attitudes, using regional data across Europe. We find a strong relationship between increases in unemployment and voting for non mainstream parties, especially populist ones. Moreover, unemployment increases in tandem with declining trust toward national and European political institutions, though we find only weak or no effects of unemployment on interpersonal trust. The correlation between unemployment and attitudes toward immigrants is muted, especially for their cultural impact. To explore causality, we extract the component of increases in unemployment explained by the precrisis structure of the economy, in particular the share of construction in regional value added, which is strongly related both to the buildup preceding and the bursting of the crisis. Our results imply that crisis-driven economic insecurity is a substantial determinant of populism and political distrust.

In the first chapter I show that when minorities work with managers who are more biased against their type, they perform significantly worse on a range of performance indicators. In contrast, they are more productive when working with unbiased managers. This is an empirical fact that reveals a self-fulfilling prophecy that biased managers make minorities less productive and this generates statistical discrimination in company hiring policy. The second chapter I explore how changing the value of a job vacancy by offering free recruiting services to companies affects its job supply. By offering free recruitment services it greatly increases the number of job offers posted on Pôle emploi and generates an increase in permanent job creation. This suggests that active labor market policies targeting the recruitment process of companies can have a substantial added value on the labor market. In the last chapter, it is shown that the Charlie Hebdo attacks caused a net reduction in the job search efforts of minorities compared to the majority. Employers are also reducing their search efforts for minorities, but only for permanent jobs. This decrease is partially offset by an increase in job search efforts by Pôle emploi counselors after the shock, but only in regions where latent discrimination, as measured by the share of local votes for the National Front, is relatively low.

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.

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Political and social behaviors such as political participation, trust in others, collective engagement, health prevention, or attitudes toward contraception can persist for many, many years. This dissertation presents work that explores and rigorously quantifies instances of persistence in these behaviors, using new historical and contemporary data sources. The work presented in this thesis contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it presents a new database on the presence of Christian missionaries in Africa and their investments. This database is unique in that it is fully geocoded and presents data at a very fine level of disaggregation. Second, this work highlights novel channels of persistence in development that are not attributable to institutional differences. Third, by analyzing the intensive margin of diversity, this work also proposes a new way of approaching the question of endogeneity in the study of the economic role of diversity of origins in a society. The first part of this thesis is a work on the persistent effect on the development of missionary activity in sub-Saharan Africa. The second part of this dissertation studies the social conditions that make differences in background a barrier to economic success in the United States.

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"France is caught in a vicious circle with considerable economic and social costs. For more than twenty years, surveys conducted in all developed countries have shown that here, more than anywhere else, people distrust their fellow citizens, the public authorities and the market. This distrust goes hand in hand with a more frequent lack of civic-mindedness, and yet distrust and lack of civic-mindedness, far from being immutable cultural traits, are fueled by the corporatism and statism of the French social model. In turn, the lack of trust among the French hinders their ability to cooperate, which leads the state to regulate everything and to empty social dialogue of its content. By comparing the relationship between economic performance and social attitudes in some thirty countries from the early 1950s to the present, Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc show how this lack of confidence significantly reduces employment, growth and, above all, the French people's ability to be happy." [Source: 4th cover].

We show the existence of a twin peaks relation between trust and the size of the welfare state that stems from two opposing forces. Uncivic people support large welfare states because they expect to benefit from them without bearing their costs. But civic individuals support generous benefits and high taxes only when they are surrounded by trustworthy individuals. We provide empirical evidence for these behaviors and this twin peaks relation in the OECD countries.

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Public action today seems to face an impossible equation, between reduced resources and increased discontent. Traditional approaches to reform have failed. To this declinist approach, L'Etat en mode start-up opposes another vision, that of a reinvented public action, more agile and collaborative, "enhanced" by technological and social innovation. Digital transformation, citizen involvement, a rethinking of a uniform public service model in favor of a personalized approach, trust and accountability of those in charge of day-to-day public action: a new age of public action is taking shape. A new age of public action is taking shape, and a new generation of public actors is needed to bring it about. By giving a voice to some of them, this book shows that reform is possible, that it is often underway, and that it provides answers to the concerns of our society. Edited by Yann Algan, Dean of the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po and professor of economics, specialist in the digital and collaborative economy, and Thomas Cazenave, Inspector of Finance, deputy director of the cabinet of the Minister of Economy, Industry and the Digital Economy, teacher at Sciences Po and ENA. The book is edited by Yann Algan and includes contributions from Jack Azoulay, Jean Bassères, Henri Bergeron, Alice Bougnères, Patrick Castel, Aude Costa de Beauregard, Laurent Cros, Elisabeth Grosdhomme Lulin, Marie-Christine Lepetit, Bruno Mettling, Alexandra Roulet, Karim Tadjeddine and Henri Verdier.

In this essay, we analyze the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure. Economists also distinguish themselves from other social scientists through their much better material situation (many teach in business schools, have external consulting activities), their more individualist worldviews, and their confidence in their discipline's ability to fix the world's problems. Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists' objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority and entitlement. While this superiority has certainly fueled economists' practical involvement and their considerable influence over the economy, it has also exposed them more to conflicts of interests, political critique, even derision.

What are the costs of inflation fluctuations and who bears those costs? In this paper, we investigate this question by means of a quantitative incomplete-market, heterogenous-agent model wherein households hold real and nominal assets and are subject to both idiosyncratic labor income shocks and aggregate inflation risk. A key feature of our analysis is a nonhomothetic specication for households' preferences towards money and consumption goods. Unlike traditional specications, ours allows the model to reproduce the broad features of the distribution of monetary assets (in addition to being consistent with the distribution of nonmonetary assets). Inflation risk is found to generate significant welfare losses for most households, i.e., between 1 and 1.5 percent of permanent consumption. The loss is small or even negative for households at the very top of the productivity and/or wealth distribution.

What are the costs of inflation fluctuations and who bears those costs? In this paper, we investigate this question by means of a quantitative incomplete-market, heterogenous-agent model wherein households hold real and nominal assets and are subject to both idiosyncratic labor income shocks and aggregate inflation risk. A key feature of our analysis is a nonhomothetic specification for households' preferences towards money and consumption goods. Unlike traditional specifications, ours allows the model to reproduce the broad features of the distribution of monetary assets (in addition to being consistent with the distribution of nonmonetary assets). Inflation risk is found to generate significant welfare losses for most households, i.e., between 1 and 1.5 percent of permanent consumption. The loss is small or even negative for households at the very top of the productivity and/or wealth distribution.

Peer-to-peer violence in schools is a worrying phenomenon, especially given its potential long-term impact on the future of children. Here we evaluate the effects of a "School Social Mediation" (SSM) program aimed at reducing peer violence. Thanks to a random assignment experimental protocol, we show that the effects of the program are very important when it is implemented by experienced mediators: in middle school, the rate of perceived harassment is then reduced by 11%. Specifically, the program is extremely beneficial for the students most exposed to violence: the probability of feeling harassed decreases by 46% for 6th grade boys and by 26% for 5th grade girls. Interesting effects are also visible on the psychological and social well-being of students, as well as on student and teacher absenteeism.

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In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I exploit the centralized high school admission system in Mexico City to analyze two effects. On the one hand, I study the effect of a change in demand for elite schools on the stratification of the educational system by family income. On the other hand, I estimate the effect of entering an elite school on students' expectations about their future wages, thus proposing a new measure of the value added of an educational choice. In my third chapter, I assess the impact of the teacher selection system on student performance. I exploit a recent reform in Mexico, where some teachers are hired via a standardized examination system, and others via the traditional discretionary system in which teachers' unions play a dominant role.

From open source software to Wikipedia, peer production mobilizes hundreds of thousands of contributors around the world. It is an important source of value creation in the highly competitive information and technology sectors, and a major source of innovation. Even beyond its economic importance, the emergence of peer production represents an opportunity to shed new light on a number of long-standing and particularly difficult questions in the literature. Given the often unconventional nature of work incentives in peer production environments, they are particularly well suited to study the impact of non-standard economic preferences on the production of public goods, to analyze their role as work incentives, and to assess their consequences in terms of organizational economics.This dissertation work relies on an original online experimentation tool (developed and evaluated in Chapter 1) to combine large-scale online experiments and computational methods (i.This work relies on a novel online experimentation tool (developed and evaluated in Chapter 1) to combine large-scale online experiments and computational methods (i. e. systematic data mining of subjects' field behavior) in order to (i) conduct the first-ever comprehensive field test of the theory of private production of public goods, (ii) study the importance of social preferences as work motivations in real productive organizations, and (iii) conduct the first field tests documenting endogenous matching behaviors of economic agents in productive teams based on their cooperative type.

There is a French paradox: private happiness and public unhappiness. While the French say they are relatively satisfied with their private lives and with family and community solidarity, they express a great deal of mistrust towards the rest of society. They regularly declare themselves more pessimistic about their collective destiny and their taste for living together than citizens of other developed countries. How can such pessimism be explained in a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world? Recent research in the social sciences, economics and medicine on the causes of well-being provides a convincing and well-founded answer: well-being depends above all on the quality of social relations. However, the French suffer from a profound lack of cooperation and reciprocity. They distrust others, but also their institutions, justice, parliament, trade unions, or even companies, competition and the market, much more often than citizens of most other developed countries. They also say they suffer from conflictual and hierarchical relationships, whether at school, in their companies, or in their relationship with public institutions. This mistrust has a considerable economic and human cost (.).

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions and growth. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms and the methods employed to identify the causal impact of trust on economic performance are reviewed. We document the mechanisms of interactions between trust and economic development in the realms of finance, innovation, the organization of firms, the labor market and the product market. The last part reviews recent progress to identify how institutions and policies can affect trust and well-being.

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions, and economic development. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms that explain the influence of trust on economic performance and the methods employed to identify the causal impact of trust on economic performance are reviewed. We document the mechanisms of interactions between trust and economic development in the realms of finance, innovation, the organization of firms, the labor market, and the product market. The last part reviews recent progress to identify how institutions and policies can affect trust.

My dissertation is composed of four separate chapters that share the same underlying topic of investigating how local conditions may affect labor supply, other behaviors, or such things as trust, social capital, subjective well-being (SWB), and reported happiness. The first chapter is entitled "Happy at Work? Employment and BES in Indonesia". In this chapter, I investigate whether working in the informal sector makes people worse off compared to those who work formally. The second chapter is titled after the results I find there: "When unemployment makes you unhappy, return to employment is faster". This second chapter estimates a model of unemployment duration that combines BES data to estimate unemployment duration as a function of BES loss when individuals entered unemployment. The third chapter, "Ethnic Diversity and Trust in Indonesia" links sources such as the census and survey data, and finds that ethnically diverse municipalities have lower levels of social capital and trust than more homogeneous municipalities. In the final chapter, I investigate whether income inequality at the municipal level is correlated with resident happiness, using Indonesian data. As a whole, these four chapters provide some conclusions about how local conditions-whether it is the industry composition of employment, the level of local inequality, or the ethnic composition-may affect people's happiness, their BES, and their labor market and other behaviors.

We show the existence of a twin peaks relation between trust and the size of the welfare state that stems from two opposing forces. Uncivic people support large welfare states because they expect to benefit from them without bearing their costs. But civic individuals support generous benefits and high taxes only when they are surrounded by trustworthy individuals. We provide empirical evidence for these behaviors and this twin peaks relation in the OECD countries.

Although almost nonexistent 15 years ago, there are now numerous papers that analyze models with both aggregate uncertainty and a large number—typically a continuum—of heterogeneous agents. These models make it possible to study whether macroeconomic fluctuations affect different agents differently and whether heterogeneity in turn affects macroeconomic fluctuations. This chapter reviews different algorithms to solve and simulate these models. In addition, it highlights problems with popular accuracy tests and discusses more powerful alternatives.

This paper demonstrates the effects of ethnic diversity on social relationships and the quality of public spaces at a very finite neighborhood level. We use detailed block level data on diversity and housing quality from a representative survey on housing in France. We show how and to what extent diversity within a neighborhood can directly affect household well-being and the quality of the common spaces, whereas the previous literature looks at more aggregate outcomes through voting channels. Our identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of public housing allocations with respect to ethnic characteristics in France, to address the bias due to endogenous residential sorting. Diversity is shown to have a negative effect on the quality of local public goods, either due to vandalism, not deterred by other-regarding preferences and social policing, or due to collective action failure to ensure effective property management. However, we find that diversity has no robust effect on public safety at a local level and, if anything, is more related to social anomie.

Diversity reflects the fact that members of a community differ according to certain characteristics, related to ethnic origin, socio-economic status or culture. The rise of trade and economic integration has presented modern societies with increasing levels of diversity. This thesis assesses the social and economic impact of local diversity. It shows how the diversity of a neighborhood affects the living conditions and employment prospects of its residents. This work contributes to the literature in three ways: it examines unexplored issues at a very local level, reveals underlying mechanisms, and provides new methods for addressing endogeneity. Chapter 1 shows that diversity of origins has a negative effect on the quality of local public goods, due to vandalism related to a lack of peer pressure, and due to the failure of collective action that would enable effective property management. No robust effect on public safety is noted. Chapter 2 reveals that the effect of unemployment on crime has a spatial dimension. For economic crime, unemployment in the surrounding neighborhoods has a stronger effect than in the immediate neighborhood, with the reverse being true for vandalism. Chapter 3 shows that people living in a more diverse neighborhood have lower employment prospects, with this effect related more to the cultural than the ethnic dimension of diversity. Chapter 4 develops a model rationalizing ethnic minorities' use of the informal economy in response to unfavorable labor market conditions.

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.

In cross-country data, teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are related to various dimensions of social capital. In micro-data from three datasets, teaching practices are also strongly correlated with student beliefs about cooperation across schools within countries. To address omitted variable and reverse causality concerns, we show that, within schools, teaching practices also have an independent and sizeable effect on student beliefs. The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes the formation of social capital.

The concepts of cultural diversity and cultural identity are at the forefront of the political debate in many western societies. In Europe, the discussion is stimulated by the political pressures associated with immigration flows, which are increasing in many European countries. The imperatives that current immigration trends impose on European democracies bring to light a number of issues that need to be addressed. What are the patterns and dynamics of cultural integration? How do they differ across immigrants of different ethnic groups and religious faiths? How do they differ across host societies? What are the implications and consequences for market outcomes and public policy? Which kind of institutional contexts are more or less likely to accommodate the cultural integration of immigrants? All these questions are crucial for policy makers and await answers. This book aims to provide a stepping stone to the debate. Taking an economic perspective, this edited book presents a current, comparative picture of the process of cultural integration of immigrants across Europe. It documents the main economic debates on the causes and consequences of cultural integration of immigrants, and provides detailed descriptions of the cultural and economic integration process in seven main European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It also compares the European context with the integration of immigrants in the United States. (Publisher's abstract).

This article surveys recent research on the relationship between trust and growth. It documents the strong international and interregional heterogeneity of trust. The theoretical mechanisms that explain the influence of trust on economic performance and the empirical methods used to identify the causal impact of trust on economic performance are reviewed.

"Hierarchy, inequality and mistrust" is the real motto of French society, according to the authors. Excessively hierarchical, elitist, conflictual, the organization of society undermines social relations, confidence in the future and growth. However, the decline is not inevitable. They evoke certain reforms carried out abroad, offering other paths.

The essays in this thesis use empirical evidence to answer two questions that are of central importance given our growing understanding of the relationship between social preferences and economic growth and welfare at the country level: the basis for prosocial behavior and the impact of policies aimed at increasing it. Levels of prosocial behavior have often been taken as fixed, but these tests provide evidence that they are susceptible to change from policy interventions. Given that there are few interventions specifically focused on trust and cooperation, there may be considerable scope for improving well-being by increasing policy focus on this issue. This is what is demonstrated in these essays. Chapter 1 discusses the foundations of pro-social behavior using different frameworks in demands for a contribution to the public good, and shows that information about the social norm is the most powerful motivating factor. Chapter 2 provides empirical and theoretical results that pro-social behavior at the community level (by contributing to local public services) depends on the expected effectiveness of that behavior. Chapter 3 provides new results on the impact of trust at the individual level, and shows that a childhood training program that increased trust (as well as improved attention and reduced delinquency), triggered a chain of events to improve long-term outcomes in terms of education, crime, and economic performance.

This thesis empirically studies different facets of senior citizens' behaviors in the context of an individualization of retirement choices linked to reforms of the old-age insurance systems. The first two chapters are analyses of the impact of work on health where I use the reforms of the French general pension scheme as exogenous shocks. Health is evaluated on two criteria: well-being (physical, mental, social) and mortality. I show the harmful effects of work on physical health and that it increases mortality. However, the nature and magnitude of the effects are very heterogeneous according to gender, education or income level. Less educated people suffer more physical damage from work, and women improve their sociability more than men after retirement. Working time during life increases mortality for men with the lowest pensions (less than 954 euros per month), while other income groups are more affected by retirement age. The third chapter compares the rigidity of employment rates of older workers in the face of pension reforms in OECD countries. Without any real causal link, pension reforms aimed at increasing the employment of older workers are much more effective when labour relations are considered harmonious. Moreover, the rigidity of employment is accompanied by a strong dispersion of opinions on this issue within the population. The origin of the heterogeneities in behavior must be analyzed. The fourth chapter focuses on one of them: differences in the experiences of older workers with economic shocks. I show that economic growth during childhood makes people more optimistic about the future of the US economy. The sons of the unemployed are more pessimistic than the rest of the population about their own future in the labor market. This pessimism is not justified because they are less likely to be fired from their jobs. In addition, they are more risk-averse and uncertain as they are less likely to invest their capital in the financial markets and more likely to frame their inheritance through the writing of a will. Sufficiently high unemployment benefits reduce or even cancel this phenomenon.

Social capital consists of the values that lead people to cooperate and act with reciprocity and empathy in the absence of any formal control mechanism. Social capital manifests itself through trust, but also through opinions in favor of collective rather than individual responsibility for economic security. This thesis provides new answers to two fundamental questions in the literature. What are the consequences of value differences for economic activity? What determines the existence of such values? The first two chapters focus on the relationship between trust on the one hand and macroeconomic volatility and financial development on the other. The analysis shows that trust reduces economic volatility and promotes financial development both in space and time. The third documents a non-monotonic relationship between norms of cooperation and generosity of the welfare state. Generous welfare states can exist both in countries with high levels of trust and in those with low levels of trust if many citizens take undue advantage of the social insurance system. The question of the origin of values is addressed in the last two chapters. The fourth looks at the persistence of values associated with the myth of early mining in the United States: individual responsibility and opposition to public intervention. The final chapter looks at changes in trust in leaders and institutions in Africa following riots or demonstrations.

This thesis presents four independent attempts to evaluate public policies, applying recent microeconometric methods. After a first chapter presenting a summary in French, the second chapter evaluates the impact of the so-called ecological bonus/malus reform on CO2 emissions. This offers a credible source of identification of the sensitivity of consumer choices to financial incentives. Estimates suggest a negative balance sheet for the measure, due to strong volume effects. The third chapter assesses the ability of tax measures to revitalize local economic activity, through the Urban Free Zone scheme. Access to precise local data makes it possible to assess the impact of tax exemptions granted to firms setting up in second-generation ZFUs. These exemptions have a positive but weak impact on business creation and employment compared to other similar disadvantaged areas. The fourth chapter looks at the consequences of temporary contracts on occupational trajectories. Controlling for individual heterogeneity bias with a fixed effects model, we show that fixed-term contracts significantly increase transitions to stable employment compared to unemployment. In contrast, temporary work only marginally improves these transitions. The fifth chapter deals with the effects of the minimum wage increases created by the Fillon law on wage inequality. The estimates suggest that the minimum wage increases would have a significant but small effect on wage distributions.

This thesis proposes an integrative approach to capital accumulation behavior and job search decisions in order to account for transitions in the labor market and more generally for contemporary fluctuations in unemployment. This integrative perspective draws its legitimacy from the close links between the traditional literature on job search models initiated by Phelps and a reflection on the market for capital, such as the questions of the sources of financing for research, the discount rate of its return and the adjustments to employment that give this factor a temporality similar to that of capital. We show in return that the recognition of these links is essential in both the positive and normative analysis of employment flows. From the point of view of firms, the introduction of endogenous adjustments of capital and interest rates, within the framework of stochastic matching models à la Mortensen and Pissarides, is able to account for the strong persistence observed in unemployment and job destruction rates. From this perspective, the introduction of employment protection can stabilize the economy and increase the welfare of risk-averse workers. From the point of view of risk averse workers, we show from micro-econometric estimates on the European Panel that their job search is strongly influenced by their wealth. We then reassess the welfare gains of unemployment benefits when we take into account the possibility for workers to self-insure by saving in a framework of incomplete markets. We show that saving is a poor substitute for benefits when we take into account variations in the interest rate and the duration of unemployment episodes over the business cycle.