Decreuse

Publications

Property crime and private protection allocation within cities: Theory and evidenceJournal articleBruno Decreuse, Steeve Mongrain and Tanguy van Ypersele, Economic Inquiry, Volume 60, Issue 3, pp. 1142-1163, 2022

Canada exhibits no correlation between income and victimization, rich neighborhoods are less exposed to property crime, rich households are more victimized than their neighbors, and rich households and neighborhoods invest more in protection. We provide a theory consistent with these facts. Criminals within city choose a neighborhood and pay a search cost to compare potential victims, whereas households invest in self-protection. As criminals' return to search increases with neighborhood income, households in rich neighborhoods are likelier to enter a race to greater protection driving criminals toward poorer areas. A calibration reproduces the Canadian victimization and protection pattern by household/neighborhood income.

Statistical Discrimination in a Search Equilibrium Model: Racial Wage and Employment Disparities in the USJournal articleBruno Decreuse and Linas Tarasonis, Annals of Economics and Statistics, Issue 143, pp. 105-136, 2021

In the US, black workers spend more time in unemployment, lose their jobs more rapidly, and earn lower wages than white workers. This paper quantifies the contributions of statistical discrimination, as portrayed by negative stereotyping and screening discrimination, to such employment and wage disparities. We develop an equilibrium search model of statistical discrimination with learning based on Moscarini (2005) and estimate it by indirect inference. We show that statistical discrimination alone cannot simultaneously explain the observed differences in residual wages and monthly job loss probabilities between black and white workers. However, a model with negative stereotyping, larger unemployment valuation and faster learning about the quality of matches for black workers can account for these facts. One implication of our findings is that black workers have larger returns to tenure. JEL Codes: J31, J64, J71.

Job protection, housing market regulation, and the youthJournal articleAntoine Bonleu, Bruno Decreuse and Tanguy van Ypersele, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Volume 21, Issue 6, pp. 1017-1036, 2019

Young Europeans experience high unemployment rates, job instability, and late emancipation. Meanwhile, they do not support reforms weakening protection on long-term contracts. In this paper, we suggest a possible rationale for such reform distaste. When the rental market is strongly regulated, landlords screen applicants with regard to their ability to pay the rent. Protecting regular jobs offers a second-best technology to sort workers, thereby increasing the rental market size. We provide a model where nonemployed workers demand protected jobs despite unemployment and the share of short-term jobs increases, whereas the individual risk of dismissal is unaffected. Our theory can be extended to alternative risks and markets involving correlated risks and commitment under imperfect information.

Neighbor discrimination theory and evidence from the French rental marketJournal articlePierre-Philippe Combes, Bruno Decreuse, Benoît Schmutz and Alain Trannoy, Journal of Urban Economics, Volume 104, Issue C, pp. 104-123, 2018

This paper describes a novel concept of customer discrimination in the housing market, neighbor discrimination. We develop a matching model with ethnic externalities in which landlords differ in the number of apartments they own within the same building. Larger landlords are more likely to discriminate only if some tenants are prejudiced against the minority group. Observing that minority tenants are less likely than majority group tenants to live in a building with a single large landlord is thus evidence of neighbor discrimination. We show empirically that African immigrants in France are significantly less likely to live in a building owned by a single landlord. This increases the probability that African immigrants live in public housing in localities with more single-landlord private apartment blocks.

Can the HOS model explain changes in labor shares? A tale of trade and wage rigiditiesJournal articleBruno Decreuse and Paul Maarek, Economic Systems, Volume 41, Issue 4, pp. 472-491, 2017

This paper questions the ability of the standard HOS (Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson) model to explain changes in the labor shares (LS) of income in OECD countries. We use the Davis (1998) version of the HOS model with wage rigidity in a sub-group of countries. We show that trade openness with developing countries reduces LS in rigid wage countries and does not affect LS in free wage countries. This pattern is induced by factor reallocation towards capital-intensive sectors in rigid wage countries. Using the KLEMS dataset for 8 OECD countries over the period 1970–2005, we show that the weight of capital-intensive sectors substantially increased in continental European countries, while it did not change or even decreased in the US and the UK. Fixed effects regressions suggest that trade intensity with China explains between 50% (IV estimates) and 80% (OLS estimates) of the observed differential labor share change between Continental Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries.

Matching with PhantomsJournal articleArnaud Cheron and Bruno Decreuse, Review of Economic Studies, Volume 84, Issue 3, pp. 1041-1070, 2017

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

Customer Discrimination and Employment Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from the French Labor MarketJournal articlePierre-Philippe Combes, Bruno Decreuse, Morgane Laouénan and Alain Trannoy, Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 34, Issue 1, pp. 107-160, 2016

The paper investigates the link between the over-exposure of African immigrants to unemployment in France and their under-representation in jobs in contact with customers. We build a two-sector matching model with ethnic sectorspecifc preferences, economy-wide employer discrimination, and customer discrimination in jobs in contact with customers. The outcomes of the model allow us to build a test of ethnic discrimination in general and customer discrimination in particular. We run the test on French individual data in a cross-section of local labor markets (Employment Areas). Our results show that there is both ethnic and customer discrimination in the French labor market.

FDI and the Labor Share in Developing Countries : A Theory and Some EvidenceJournal articleBruno Decreuse and Paul Maarek, Annals of Economics and Statistics, Volume Special issue on health and labour economics, Issue 119-120, pp. 289-319, 2015

We address the effects of FDI on the labor share in developing countries. Our theory relies on the impacts of FDI on wage and labor productivity in a frictional labor market. FDI has two opposite effects on the labor share: a negative force originated by technological advance, and a positive force due to increased labor market competition between .rms. We test this theory on aggregate panel data through fixed effects and IV estimates. We examine the relationship between the labor share in the manufacturing sector and the ratio of FDI stock to GDP. We show that FDI has decreased the labor share in the host countries of our dataset. This impact amounts to between 10% to 20% of the mean labor share in our sample.

Unemployment benefits, job protection, and the nature of educational investmentJournal articleBruno Decreuse and Pierre Granier, Labour Economics, Volume 23, Issue C, pp. 20-29, 2013

This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions covering the risk of unemployment on the nature of educational investment. We offer a matching model of unemployment in which individuals of a given education determine the scope (or adaptability) and intensity (or productivity) of their human capital before entering the labor market. Our model features an increasing relationship between match surplus and the return to adaptability skills. This relationship explains why matching frictions promote adaptability skills instead of productivity skills, and why unemployment benefits and job protection create the incentive for productivity skill acquisition.

Lutter contre les discriminations : comment faire autrement ?Journal articleBruno Decreuse and Alain Trannoy, Problèmes Économiques, Volume HS, pp. 51-55, 2012