COUPRIE Helene

In recent decades, the family has undergone major changes in most OECD countries. On the one hand, the fertility rate has decreased. On the other hand, the number of separations has increased significantly. This thesis proposes to study the effects of these changes in family structure on the human capital of individuals, by considering it as a new source of inequalities. In a microeconomic framework, this thesis mobilizes econometric tools and applies them to large databases. The three chapters of this thesis present new results on the effect of parental separation and family size on the human capital of the individual. The first chapter focuses on the effect of parental separation in France on individuals' occupational success, and shows a negative effect of parental separation on the individual's educational level and social position. Using American data, the second chapter focuses on the mechanisms explaining this effect, and in particular, on changes in time spent with parents. Thus, 30% of the effect of parental separation on the socio-emotional development of children is explained by the decrease in time spent with at least one parent. The third chapter considers another aspect of family structure: family size. We find that the arrival of a third child in the family decreases the socio-emotional competencies of the other children, particularly for girls.

Empirical studies cast doubt on the efficiency assumption made in standard economic models of household behavior. In couples, the allocation of time between activities remains highly differentiated by gender. In this paper we examine whether couples deviate from efficiency in household production, using an experimental design. We compare the allocation of gendered vs. gender-neutral domestic tasks. Our results show that women in the household overspecialize in “feminine tasks” and men in “masculine tasks” compared to what their comparative advantage would require, hence revealing the influence of gender roles and stereotypes on the couples’ behavior.

One out of three young people works part-time at least once during the seven years of their early career. Part-time work may be a step in the integration process or it may reflect difficulties in entering the labor market. Indeed, two-thirds of young people working part-time would like to work full-time. We compare the trajectories of entry into the labor force over a period of seven years for two generations of first-time school leavers in metropolitan France: the 2004 generation, surveyed in 2011, and the 1998 generation, surveyed in 2005. On the basis of this comparison, we propose a difference-in-difference methodology to assess the causal impact of the crisis on the integration pathway of these young people. Several elements emerge from the analysis.

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Atypical forms of employment", deviating from the norm of salaried employment on permanent, full-time contracts, have been developing on the French labor market for several decades. These atypical forms of employment primarily concern young people and can be a prerequisite for sustainable integration or leave scars on their medium-term employment chances. We compare the labor market entry trajectories of cohorts of first-time school leavers in 1998, 2004 and 2010 using a dynamic Markov model of heterogeneous labor market transitions. Our analyses show that the employment norm is increasingly difficult to achieve. Recent changes in the dynamics of labor market transitions, linked to the 2008 crisis, appear to be highly heterogeneous. They have contributed to compensating for the deterioration in the trend of springboard effects from full-time employment on fixed-term contracts to full-time permanent contracts.

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Female specialization on household work and male specialization on labor-market work is a widely observed phenomenon across time and countries. Gender differences regarding characteristics (preferences, productivity) and context (wage rates, social norms) are generally recognized to explain this fact. We experimentally investigate work division by true co-habiting couples participating in a newly developed specialization task. Efficiency in this task comes at the cost of inequality, giving higher earnings to the “advantaged” player. We compare behavior when men (or women) are in the advantaged position, which correspond to the traditional (or power) couple case where he (or she) earns more. We show that women do not contribute more than men to the household public good whatever the situation. This result allows us to rule-out some of the standard explanations of the work division puzzle.

Most household models assume that decisions taken inside the family are Pareto optimal. However, empirical studies cast doubts upon the efficiency assumption. The sharing of time among men and women between market work and household work is highly differentiated by gender. In this paper we examine whether couples deviate from efficiency in household production decisions, using an experimental design in which subjects are real couples. The aim of the experiment is to mimic the sharing of highly-gendered household tasks. We compare the sharing of gendered tasks to that of more neutral tasks. By measuring individual productivity in each task, we can see if couples tend to deviate from efficiency, and by how much in each case. As we show that they deviate more when sharing gendered tasks, we also explore why, looking at different possible explanations, and we find evidence of the impact of stereotypes on inefficiencies.

This study makes a significant contribution to investigations of household behavior by testing for a willingness to cooperate and share income by men and women who are either in couple with each other or complete strangers. We present results from an economic experiment conducted with 100 co-habiting heterosexual couples. We compare defection behavior in the prisoner’s dilemma within real couples to pairs of strangers. One out of four participants chose not to cooperate with their spouse. To understand why spouses might prefer defection, we use a novel allocation task to elicit the individual’s trade-off between efficiency and equality within a couple. We further investigate the impact of socio-demographic and psychological characteristics of the couples. We find in particular that lack of preferences for joint income maximization, having children and being married lead to higher defection rates in the social dilemma. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016.

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