REBERIOUX Antoine

We develop a simple theoretical model showing that, by adding to the adjustment costs associated with permanent contracts, local social pressure against dismissals creates an incentive for CEOs to rely on fixed-term contracts, in an attempt to escape social pressure. Using linked employer-employee data, we show that establishments located closer to headquarters have higher shares of fixed-term contracts in hiring than those located further away whenever firms' headquarters are located in self-centered communities and the CEO not only works but also lives there. We show that these findings can only be explained by local social pressure.

This article examines the private return on R&D tax credit, defined as the ratio of total tax reliefs obtained by a firm through R&D tax credit to real R&D spending. Based on a dataset merging different sources for French companies, we first show that the distribution of this private return is dispersed. We then use clustering analyses to identify six mutually exclusive types of firms' R&D strategies. We finally show in a regression setting that these strategies explain part of the variance in the private return on R&D tax credit. This study contributes to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of firms' R&D strategies. It also seeks to open new directions in debates surrounding the proper design and reforms of R&D tax credit schemes.

We develop a simple theoretical model showing that, by adding to the adjustment costs associated with permanent contracts, local social pressure against dismissals creates an incentive for CEOs to rely on fixed-term contracts, in an attempt to escape social pressure. Using linked employer-employee data, we show that establishments located closer to headquarters have higher shares of fixed-term contracts in hiring than those located further away whenever firms' headquarters are located in self-centered communities and the CEO not only works but also lives there. We show that these findings can only be explained by local social pressure.

A pioneer in the consecration of equality between men and women, Tunisia has been an exception in the Arab world since its independence in 1956. However, despite legislation that promotes equality, women employees are underrepresented in the management of the civil service, even though they are as numerous and educated as their male counterparts. The current political upheaval has had a significant impact on women's working lives, including the distribution of wages in the labor market and recruitment patterns, and, in turn, on career opportunities and access to higher-paying jobs. To study the situation of women and the wage gap in the public and private sectors, our approach is essentially empirical. Two models are applied to the 2011 and 2015 national employment surveys in order to calculate the wage gap and provide some answers as to which sector is the most discriminating. Thus, notwithstanding the undeniable achievements, the applicability of equality - between women and men in the labor market - still remains incomplete.

We study the reactions to job destructions on Twitter. We use information on large-scale job-destruction and job-creation events announced in the United Kingdom over the period 2013-2018. We match it with data collected on Twitter regarding the number and sentiments of the tweets posted around the time of the announcement and involving the company name. We show that job-destruction announcements immediately elicit numerous and strongly negative reactions. On the day of the announcement, the number of tweets and first-level replies sharply increases as does the negativity of the sentiments of the posted tweets. These reactions are systematically more important than reactions to job creations. We also show that they trigger significant losses in the market value of the downsizing firms. Our findings suggest that job destructions generate reputational costs for firms to the extent that they induce a strong negative buzz involving the company name.

Promoted by managerial innovations, employee involvement in the workplace finds a logical outcome in their participation in company decisions. This participation also responds to the aspiration of employees and their representatives to intervene in working conditions, to discuss employment and remuneration issues, as well as the strategic choices of their company. Some are at the discretion of management, others are compulsory, and the participation mechanisms listed and analyzed in this book take various forms: economic rights of the works council, collective bargaining, representation on the board of directors, etc. How do these channels fit together? How do they contribute to the improvement of working conditions, to the ecological transition, to the social responsibility of companies? What can we expect from them in terms of competitiveness? A synthetic and critical overview, while the PACTE law of May 22, 2019 prescribes greater employee participation in the capital and strategic decisions of companies." (publisher source).

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How to think about the economy differently? For thirty years, researchers from different disciplines have been participating in the development of an economics of conventions that constructs a new representation of the economy. The 75 authors in this book provide an exceptional insight into this approach, based on the work of one of its main architects, Olivier Favereau. More than any other economist, he has worked throughout his career on interdisciplinary exchanges to renew our understanding of economic phenomena. The various entries in this non-standard dictionary discuss, use or extend this work. The reader thus has an unparalleled introduction to contemporary debates on the evolution of economic knowledge: the new representations of the firm, work, finance and more generally of economic behavior and its political dimension.

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This thesis studies the relationship between innovation and job quality. Innovation is considered as the main engine of economic growth, but technological changes induce important mutations in employment and work. Innovation is therefore at the heart of many concerns, and is at the center of recommendations made by public authorities and international organizations. Its multiple effects raise more and more questions, since the recent period is marked by an intensification of innovation dynamics, with the emergence of new technological cycles. It is a vector of transformations for employment that must be qualified. This thesis adopts a mainly empirical perspective, while relying on an institutionalist and evolutionist theoretical approach. The quality of employment is considered from a multidimensional perspective, including working conditions, working hours and duration, contractual quality and remuneration. Similarly, innovation is analyzed in its complexity in order to highlight heterogeneous effects according to the forms considered (strategy, type of innovation, degree of rupture and degree of novelty). The results of this study justify the interest of a specific field of study in economics on the links between innovation and job quality. While confirming that some innovations have positive direct effects on the quality of employment, this thesis shows that indirect effects as well as certain forms of innovation diffusion deteriorate the contractual quality of jobs and working conditions. Moreover, although innovation (whatever its form) is often associated with better contractual conditions (salary, stability, etc.), it nevertheless leads to an intensification of the pace and demands of employment. This work formulates a main recommendation in the context of the intensification of innovation dynamics and knowledge-based economic models - while calling for future work and improvement of the available data. In order to avoid a polarization of working conditions and a rise in inequalities, it is necessary to adapt redistribution and regulation systems to cope with the negative indirect effects of the diffusion of innovations.

This paper examines the rise of China's relative standing in the global academic science marketplace. We first develop a simple theoretical model, based on the aggregation of individual knowledge production functions. This model predicts the existence of a stable power (scaling) law, relating the world share of countries' scientific production to their world share of public investment in scientific research. We test and confirm this prediction, using bibliometric crosscountry longitudinal data for OECD and non-OECD countries, over the 1996-2015 period. This analysis allows for China's impressive catch-up, and for the West's decline to be accounted for, in the science marketplace, over the last two decades.

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In this comparative study on France and Great Britain, the authors analyze the links between industrial relations and adjustments (in staffing and wages) in the face of the 2007-2008 crisis, based on two highly comparable establishment-level surveys, one British (WERS), the other French (REPONSE), collected in 2010-2012. Despite the different contexts (composition of the productive fabric, temporality and impact of the crisis), the links between social relations and adjustment strategies appear to be similar (union presence is not sufficient to prevent adjustments). The differentiation of industrial relations systems does not therefore explain the differences in adjustment patterns observed at the macroeconomic level.

We investigate the impact of local social pressure against dismissals on the choice of employment contracts made by firms using French linked employer-employee data. Taking into account the potential endogeneity of plant location, we show that establishments located closer to headquarters have higher shares of fixed-term contracts in hiring than those located further away whenever firms' headquarters are located in self-centered communities. We also show that this relationship is driven by firms that are highly visible in the community of the headquarters and whose CEOs not only work but also live there. In contrast, when firms' headquarters belong to communities that are not self-centered, the impact of distance to headquarters on the share of fixed-term contracts turns out to be positive. We show that these findings can only be explained by local social pressure. When the local community at the firm's headquarters is self-centered, CEOs are under pressure to avoid dismissing workers close to headquarters. By adding to the adjustment costs associated with open-ended contracts, this creates an incentive for CEOs to rely more on fixed-term contracts, in an attempt to escape social pressure.

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This thesis examines how listed non-financial companies have been able to remain profitable despite declining investment and increased distribution of funds to shareholders in the era of financialization. This weak link between profit and investment is commonly referred to as the problem of profit without investment. The first part of the thesis situates this problem historically and theoretically. While the literature on financialization merely shows the negative effects of the distribution of funds to shareholders on investment, this thesis shows that the coexistence of high levels of profits (and financial payments) with low levels of investment was made possible by the simultaneous engagement of non-financial corporations in other types of activities. The solution to the problem of profit without investment in this case involves a shift in the activities of non-financial corporations toward the accumulation of financial assets and profits. However, in this section we provide substantial empirical evidence that rejects this alternative. The third part of the thesis shifts the focus from the financial to the productive sphere, and focuses on the relocation of production and the accumulation of intangible assets. This part, unlike the previous one, provides convincing and promising results in explaining the problem of profit without investment.

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According to the stakeholder theory, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the answer given by companies to the increasing pressure from employees, shareholders, local communities, environmental NGOs or regulators to take into account the environmental and social impacts of their activities. The challenge is not simply to compensate for negative externalities but to transform companies to allow for sustainable growth. Thus, CSR pushes companies to be proactive and to exceed regulatory expectations. However, how to reconcile such different and even opposing objectives? As more and more companies integrate CSR into their strategies, governance processes seem to be the missing link in bringing together economic, social and environmental performance. This thesis presents empirical and theoretical arguments for the impact of governance at its highest level, from the board of directors to the CEO. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 analyzes the link between board composition and the integration of CSR into corporate strategy. It is based on a law on the representation of women on boards of directors. Adopted in France in 2011, this law has led to the appointment of new directors, most of whom are younger than their predecessors. However, this chapter shows that the increase in diversity on boards is not correlated with changes in financial and non-financial performance. This chapter is based on a study of SBF 120 companies from 2009 to 2015. However, while the characteristics of the directors are involved in the decision-making process, the implementation of strategies and the management of the company is entrusted to the CEO. Through a remuneration system with a variable component, the board of directors strives to align the interests of the CEO with its own. Chapter 3 examines the effectiveness of variable remuneration based on environmental or societal criteria. It shows that the impact of these "CSR bonuses" depends on the company's governance model. For companies with a shareholder governance model, CSR bonuses seem to have only a negative impact on financial performance. On the other hand, for companies of the partnership type, these bonuses effectively improve extra-financial performance without reducing financial performance. This empirical study is based on a global panel of 3500 companies over the period 2006-2015. Chapter 4 proposes a theoretical model to analyze the impact of the intrinsic or extrinsic nature of incentives. Based on the principal-agent model developed by Che and Yoo (2001), this chapter analyzes different incentives for a company composed of two agents working on a CSR task. Three scenarios are studied: both agents receive financial compensation, both agents are intrinsically motivated, one agent is intrinsically motivated and the other financially motivated. The model shows that the optimal scenario for the principal depends on the level of intrinsic motivation but also on the interdependence between the two agents' decisions. In the particular case of the remuneration of company directors, the empirical evidence shows that including CSR criteria in the remuneration is more adapted to companies with a high decisional interdependence. The conclusion traces the link between governance and CSR at several levels, and discusses the implication of networks and mimicry effects between firms.

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This paper examines the relationships between independence, director unobservable ability and firm performance. We develop an original empirical strategy based on the AKM model to estimate separately director fixed effects (as a measure of individual ability) and firm fixed effects. We show that board independence has an ambiguous impact on corporate performance because of two opposing forces: one related to the director nomination process, the other one related to board functioning. On one hand, we report that independence is positively correlated with individual fixed effects, an evidence consistent with a nomination process of independent directors based on individual ability. On the other hand, and regarding board functioning, we show that independence, netted out individual ability, is negatively correlated with firm performance suggesting that independent board members experience an informational deficit (as compared to affiliated directors).

– This paper examines the evolution of within-board gender inequality following the adoption of a board-level gender quota for French listed companies in 2011. We show that the quota has succeeded in opening the doors of boardrooms to new, unseasoned women, who present distinctive characteristics. However, conditional on these characteristics, we provide evidence that female new comers are less likely that their male counterparts (both seasoned and new comers) to hold key positions within boards (namely, audit, compensation and nominating committee membership and chairing). This positional segregation is the main driver of a within-firm gender fees gap that amounts to 5.

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This thesis deals with work in Cooperative and Participative Societies (SCOP). Through the study of this model, an in-depth analysis of inequalities at work in the companies is proposed through the wage structure and the distribution of the costs of adjustment of the activity. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter compares the distribution of wages in SCOPs and in conventional firms (CEs), by estimating wage equations from the DADS database. The second chapter completes the first one by proposing a detailed analysis of the agents' discourse (with the help of 53 interviews carried out in 38 SCOPs of the Rhône-Alpes region) allowing to identify the principles of justice at work in the determination of the wage structures highlighted in the first chapter. The third chapter proposes an econometric analysis of the differential adaptation of SCOPs and CEs to demand shocks, through adjustments in employment, wages and hours worked. The fourth chapter explores the possibility of significant diversity among SCOPs, notably in access to membership, which could have an impact on employment adjustments. The contribution of this thesis to the economic debate can be summarized in three points. Firstly, it is the first major quantitative comparative analysis of SCOPs and CEs concerning employment and its characteristics. Secondly, the qualitative survey on which we rely, carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Grenoble, is also unique since it is the first qualitative survey of this magnitude. Its exploitation thus allows an analysis of the discourse of the members of the SCOP which had not been realized before. Finally, our positioning is also original, mobilizing approaches usually put in opposition by making them really discuss around an object whose understanding is enriched.

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the basic attributes of workplaces in Britain and France. Studies in employment relations have long recognized that these attributes are related to the practice of human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations. We pay particular attention to demographic characteristics such as size and age, to the characteristics of local managers, and to patterns of ownership and governance. We highlight striking similarities in many aspects of organizational structure, but also notable differences in some aspects of workplace governance. These similarities and differences are related to the fundamental institutional and historical characteristics of the two countries.

From the early decades of the twentieth century, a dominant characteristic of the modern "capitalist" corporation, especially in the United States, was the separation of asset ownership in the form of publicly traded shares from allocative control over the corporation’s resources by salaried managers. By the 1950s some depicted managerial-controlled large enterprise as the "soulful" corporation in which the allocation of resources resulted in enhanced social welfare. In the 1960s, however, some conservative academics looked to market forces, dubbed the "market for corporate control", to ensure that managers as employees would give primacy to shareholders in the allocation of corporate resources. This market for corporate control could enable hostile takeovers in which shareholders who accumulated large public equity stakes in a company could discipline managers to allocate resources in ways that "the market" deemed to be efficient. The notion that market allocation could control managerial organization was then developed theoretically based on the conceptualisation that the corporation (and indeed any firm) could be conceptualised as a "nexus of contracts" or a "collection of assets". Rather than view the corporation as a social organization with its unique history and competitive capabilities in which public shareholders had come to play a peripheral role, neoclassical economists conceptualised the corporation as a set of voluntary contracts among owners of resources and as a portfolio of assets with different market-determined rates of returns. This conceptualisation of the corporation to fit with the dominant neoclassical theory of the market economy had implications. We provide this Summary of certain fundamentals of economics in an effort to help prevent analytical errors which can have severe and damaging effects on corporations.

This article looks at the behavior of British and French establishments in response to the 2007-2008 crisis, in terms of external flexibility (employment adjustment) and internal flexibility (wage adjustment). It focuses on the type of social relations (and centrally on union presence) prevailing in establishments that have made these adjustments. The analysis is conducted on two highly comparable databases, one British (Wers) and one French (Reponse), both collected in 2011-2012. The results show that, despite different production fabrics and exposure to the crisis, institutions that are often presented as opposed, and distinct modes of adjustment (more internal in Great Britain and external in France), the social relations characterizing French and British establishments that have made such adjustments appear surprisingly similar. All other things being equal, these industrial relations take the form of a more marked union presence, more frequent negotiations or consultations and more likely collective disputes. Thus, open social relations seem to have accompanied the adjustments of firms in both countries to cope with the crisis. While the presence of trade unions may have moderated the extent of these adjustments for the benefit of employees (a question that the data do not allow to be examined), it does not appear in any case to have been sufficient to prevent them. The differences between the modes of adjustment observed in the two countries (relatively more often through wages in Great Britain than in France) seem to have more to do with the monetary policy situation than with labour market institutions.

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This article studies the relationship between board independence and firm operating performance in French listed companies. We take advantage of an original database, with a time-series dimension that can be used to mitigate heterogeneity and dynamic endogeneity issues. In addition, this database can be disaggregated at the individual (director) level. This design enables us to introduce firm fixed effects and individual fixed effects in firm performance equations, thereby controlling for heterogeneity at the firm and individual levels. Our main result is to document a significant negative relationship between independence and accounting performance. This result suggests that, in the French context, the costs of independence (i.e. the informational gap supported by independent directors compared to insiders and affiliated directors) outweigh the benefits of independence (i.e. the reduction in agency costs).

While often criticized, independence remains the ultimate criterion for evaluating board composition, whether for regulators or shareholder activists. In this study, we examine the relationship between board independence and firm operating performance in a panel of French listed companies, paying particular attention to heterogeneity and endogeneity concerns. We take advantage of an original database, with a time-series dimension that can be used to mitigate heterogeneity and dynamic endogeneity issues through GMM estimators. In addition, this database can be disaggregated at the individual (director) level. This design enables us to introduce firm fixed effects and individual fixed effects in (firm) performance equations, thereby controlling for heterogeneity at the firm and individual levels. To our knowledge, this is the first paper so far to provide a systematic account on this issue for France. Our main result is to document a significant negative relationship between accounting performance and the independence status (irrespective of the person). This result supports the argument of an information gap suffered by independent board members, as developed by Adams and Ferreira (2007).

This paper examines whether women’s situation within French boards has improved following the adoption of a board-level gender quota in 2011. To do so, we focus on the individual role of female directors as proxied by their fees. Our sample includes the listed companies belonging to the SBF120 index over the 2006-2014 period. We first show that the quota has succeeded in opening the doors of boardrooms to new, unseasoned female directors (not present on the director labor market before the regulation). These unseasoned female directors have distinctive characteristics (in terms of independence, experience, age, nationality, etc.) as compared to other board members. More importantly, we show that women, whether unseasoned or seasoned, experience an inner glass ceiling, with “positional” gender segregation within French boards. In particular, companies have failed so far to open the access of the most important board committees (namely monitoring committees: audit, compensation and nomination) to women. It results in a within-firm gender fees gap of 5%. Overall, the quota has rather amplified this segregation process, with an increase in the average within-firm gender fees gap.

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Journal menu CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A TYPOLOGY OF OECD COUNTRIES Download This Article Patricia Crifo, Antoine Rebérioux DOI:10.22495/jgr_v5_i2_p2 Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This article investigates the relationships between corporate governance and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The underlying intuition is that governance factors are major determinants of CSR policies and extra-financial performance. More precisely, we identify three main factors that determine the strength of CSR engagement at the firm level: the structure of equity ownership (identity of shareholders), the composition and structure of board of directors, and the regulatory framework on corporate governance and CSR. We show how evolutions regarding corporate governance over the three previous decades have paved the way and shaped the rise of CSR. In addition, we elaborate a typology of CSR and governance structures that characterize OECD countries depending on whether the CSR reporting regime is stringent versus non-stringent, and on whether the corporate governance model is based on the shareholder, stakeholder or hybrid regime.

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The remuneration of top executives has increased substantially in recent decades and has contributed to the growth of inequality through high incomes. Two typologies for controlling shareholders are proposed to analyze the evolution and practices of (P-)CEO compensation in large French listed groups. The first typology is based on the identity of the shareholder and differentiates between active shareholders committed to the firm's strategy and passive or diversified shareholders. Among the latter are shareholders whose strategy is essentially financial. Remuneration is higher and more sensitive to short-term performance for the latter. The second typology is based on two criteria: the degree of control (shareholding) and the length of control (years of control). Using a threshold panel data model (PTR model), executive compensation policies allow us to differentiate four regimes in terms of degree and two in terms of length of control. This typology differentiates between dispersed, influential, dominant and majority control, on the one hand, and the effects of recent and long-term controlling shareholders, on the other. Finally, the evolution of remuneration is studied on the basis of these two typologies and over a period of 12 years. Beyond factors linked to the functioning of the "executive market", the typologies highlight a phenomenon of catch-up and contagion following the transparency of remuneration since 2001, and a strong increase in bonuses due to the effect of the increase in market capitalization and the accompanying changes in shareholding.

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While often criticized, independence remains the ultimate criterion for evaluating board composition, whether for regulators or shareholder activists. In this study, we examine the relationship between board independence and firm operating performance in a panel of French listed companies, paying particular attention to heterogeneity and endogeneity concerns. We take advantage of an original database, with a time-series dimension that can be used to mitigate heterogeneity and dynamic endogeneity issues through GMM estimators. In addition, this database can be disaggregated at the individual (director) level. This design enables us to introduce firm fixed effects and individual fixed effects in (firm) performance equations, thereby controlling for heterogeneity at the firm and individual levels. To our knowledge, this is the first paper so far to provide a systematic account on this issue for France. Our main result is to document a significant negative relationship between accounting performance and the independence status (irrespective of the person). This result supports the argument of an information gap suffered by independent board members, as developed by Adams and Ferreira (2007).

This paper develops a two-way director-firm fixed effect model to study the relationship between independent directors’ individual heterogeneity and firm operating performance, using French data. This strategy allows considering and differentiating in a unified empirical framework mechanisms related to board functioning and mechanisms related to director selection. We first show that the independence status, netted out unobservable individual heterogeneity, is negatively related to performance. This result suggests that independent board members experience a strong informational gap that outweighs other monitoring benefits. However, we show that industry-specific expertise as well as informal connections inside the boardroom may help to bridge this gap. Second, we provide evidence that independent directors have higher intrinsic ability as compared to affiliated board members, consistent with a reputation-based selection process.

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This thesis proposes an empirical analysis of employers' behavior in the use of dismissal, for economic and personal reasons, and of the rupture conventionnelle (Re). The objective is to better characterize the actual practices of employers in their use of these different termination methods over the period 1999-2009, in order to renew the economic analysis of labor law rules by proposing a more inductive approach. In the first part of the paper, we show that the social representations of the methods of breaking open-ended contracts held by employees and employers, and above all their actual use by employers, make the boundaries supposed to delimit these legal categories permeable. The empirical determinants of the use of each of these categories are intertwined, so that it is first of all the varying degree of influence of these determinants that makes it possible to identify different models of termination. The second part of the paper first traces the historical and institutional development of breakaway practices, described as "negotiated", and whose principal figure today is the CR. Then, it evaluates the effects of the introduction of CR on the behaviour of employers by testing the hypotheses, based on the theoretical literature, that CR would facilitate, on the one hand, the termination of the employment relationship and, on the other hand, could replace dismissal, which has become more expensive and more risky. The empirical results essentially validate the first hypothesis.

Information disclosure requirements significantly increased in French listed companies in the early 2000s, converging toward the U.S./U.K. stock market standards. Following the burgeoning literature on relations between corporate governance and labor, we investigate the consequences of this process regarding worker information: does more information for shareholders mean more information for workers? Our empirical analysis takes advantage of a French (representative) establishment survey that generates linked 'employer-employee' data at two points in time, 1998 and 2004. Our results strongly suggest that worker information has improved in listed companies as an externality of the financialization process. We find however that this extra information is only partially correlated with greater employee satisfaction.

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The authors study compensation packages in family- and non-family-owned firms. Using French matched employer-employee data, they first find that family firms pay on average lower wages. Part of this wage gap is due to low-wage workers sorting into family firms and high-wage workers sorting into non-family-owned firms. however, they also find evidence that company wage policies differ according to ownership status, so that the same worker is paid differently under family and non-family firm ownership. In addition, family firms are characterized by lower job insecurity, as measured by lower dismissal rates. Family firms appear to rely less on dismissals, and more on hiring reductions, than do non-family-owned firms when they downsize. Compensating wage differentials account for a substantial part of the inverse relationship between the family/non-family gaps in wages and job security.

What can the various theories of the firm teach us about the quality of a corporate governance mode? A dominant vision - structured around Williamson's transactional logic - is identified and then criticized. Instead, an institutional approach to governance is developed. It leads to relativizing the normativity generally attributed to shareholder value, in order to put forward the notion of industrial citizenship. We then adopt a more positive approach, seeking to grasp the impact of listing and the structure of share capital on (i) employment management and work organization and (ii) employee participation in the decision-making process. This study is based in particular on an econometric treatment of the 1998 response survey. The question of the convergence of the European model of corporate governance is finally discussed.