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Morgan Raux

Faculty Aix-Marseille UniversitéFaculté d'économie et de gestion (FEG)

Public economics
Raux
Status
Assistant professor
Research domain(s)
Labour economics, Public economics
Thesis
2020, Aix-Marseille Université
PhD
Migration et marché du travail
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CV
Address

AMU - AMSE
5-9 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet, CS 50498
​13205 Marseille Cedex 1

Abstract We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the “international job market for economists”. Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, government, or companies participate in this job market. The market follows a standardized process, where candidates are pre-screened in a short interview which takes place at an annual meeting in Europe or in the United States. Most interviews are arranged via a non-profit online platform, econjobmarket.org, which kindly agreed to share its anonymized data with us. Using this dataset, we estimate the individual environmental impact of 1057 candidates and one hundred recruitment committees who attended the EEA and AEA meetings in December 2019 and January 2020. We calculate that this pre-screening system generated the equivalent of about 4800 tons of avoidable CO2-eq and a comprehensive economic cost over €4.4 million. We contrast this overall assessment against three counterfactual scenarios: an alternative in-person system, a hybrid system (where videoconference is used for some candidates) and a fully online system (as it happened in 2020–21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Overall, the study can offer useful information to shape future recruitment standards in a more sustainable way.
Keywords Comprehensive economic cost, Environmental impact, Carbon footprint, International job market, Job market for economists
Abstract Each year, the international job market for economists involves more than 1,000 candidates and several hundred recruiters from around the world meeting for short pre-screening interviews at annual congresses in Europe and the United States. Alberto Prati, Olivier Chanel and Morgan Raux argue that it’s time to reassess this unsustainable system and estimate the carbon footprint of alternatives.
Abstract This note evaluates the scrambled questions penalty using multiple choice tests taken by first-year undergraduate students who follow a microeconomics introductory course. We provide new evidence that students perform worse at scrambled questionnaires than at logically ordered ones. We improve on previous studies by explicitly modeling students individual skills thanks to a fixed effects regression. We further show that the scrambled questions penalty does not differ along gender but varies along the distribution of students' skills and mostly affects students with lower-intermediate skills.
Keywords Student performance, Scrambled questions, Multiple choice tests
Abstract This paper shows that firms' demand for high-skilled foreign workers partly results from their hiring difficulties. Relying on a within-firm identification strategy, I compare recruitment decisions made by a given employer for similar jobs differing in recruitment difficulties. I quantify how the time to fill a vacancy affects the employer's probability to look for recruiting a foreign worker. To identify this relationship, I have collected and assembled a new and original dataset at the job level. It matches online job postings to administrative data on H-1B visas applications in the US. I find that a standard deviation increase in job posting duration increases employers' probability to look for a foreign worker by 1.5 percentage points. This effect is mainly driven by firms sending only a few visa applications. It increases to 3 to 4 percentage points for architects, engineers and computer scientists.
Keywords H-1B Work Permit, Hiring difficulties, Web Scraping
Abstract This note evaluates the scrambled questions penalty using multiple choice tests taken by first-year undergraduate students who follow a microeconomics introductory course. We provide new evidence that students perform worse at scrambled questionnaires than at logically ordered ones. We improve on previous studies by explicitly modeling students individual skills thanks to a fixed effects regression. We further show that the scrambled questions penalty does not differ along gender but varies along the distribution of students’ skills and mostly affects students with lower-intermediate skills.
Keywords Multiple choice tests, Scrambled questions, Student performance