Publications

Abstract Several factors can deeply affect employees’ quality of life at work. Work-life balance, subjective well-being and job satisfaction are three of these factors and it is in the best interest of companies to handle these topics carefully. This is a sine qua non condition of the strength and the quality of relationships with employees. It is also a source of confidence for employees, especially where this is being mediated through Human Resource (HR) processes. Our article studies the quality of life at work in the particular context of an MAR healthcare pathway that exacerbates the consequences for employees. Our work with hundreds of people enduring an MAR process shows that depending on whether firms take this situation into account or not, employees will feel either well-being or ill-being and will have different burnout or job satisfaction levels. All these variables influence their commitment and job performance. These links between a healthcare pathway and quality of life at work on the one hand, and between the quality of work and performance on the other hand, should lead employers to support employees in a personal vulnerable situation. The strength and the quality of the support provided by the HR function and the management is therefore a key point in the level of confidence that exists between firms and their employees.
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Abstract Over the years, oil prices and financial stock markets have always had a complex relationship. This paper analyzes the interactions and co-movements between the oil market (WTI crude oil) and two major stock markets in Europe and the US (the Euro Stoxx 50 and the SP500) for the period from 1990 to 2023. For that, I use both the time-varying and the Markov copula models. The latter one represents an extension of the former one, where the constant term of the dynamic dependence parameter is driven by a hidden two-state first-order Markov chain. It is also called the dynamic regime-switching (RS) copula model. To estimate the model, I use the inference function for margins (IFM) method together with Kim's filter for the Markov switching process. The marginals of the returns are modeled by the GARCH and GAS models. Empirical results show that the RS copula model seems adequate to measure and evaluate the time-varying and non-linear dependence structure. Two persistent regimes of high and low dependency have been detected. There was a jump in the co-movements of both pairs during high regimes associated with instability and crises. In addition, the extreme dependence between crude oil and US/European stock markets is time-varying but also asymmetric, as indicated by the SJC copula. The correlation in the lower tail is higher than that in the upper. Hence, oil and stock returns are more closely joined and tend to co-move more closely together in bullish periods than in bearish periods. Finally, the dependence between WTI crude oil and the SP500 stock index seems to be more affected by exogenous shocks and instability than the oil and European stock markets.
Keywords Dynamic copula, Regime switching, Dependence, GARCH models, Oil and stock markets
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Abstract Many people obtain job information from friends and acquaintances. However, one factor influencing labor-market outcomes that is ignored in the literature is the presence of overlapping friendship circles in social networks. We find that overlapping friendship networks produce correlated information flows, resulting in an increased probability of two events: either receiving redundant job offers or receiving no job offers at all. Consequently, people with common contact networks exhibit worse employment prospects even if they have the same number of information providers and compete with the same number of people for vacancies. In quantitative terms, the impact of overlapping friendship circles rivals that of the number of direct contacts and contacts’ contacts. This implies that the results in Calvó-Armengol (2004) only apply for networks where people’s friends are neither connected nor have common contacts. Because overlapping friendship circles are a crucial aspect of strong relationships, our findings uncover an alternative mechanism behind "The Strength of Weak Ties" (Granovetter, 1973): their ability to maintain independence in job information flows. We further show that people with common job contacts earn lower incomes on average. However, conditional on being employed, their expected wage is higher because they can take advantage of the multiple job offers received by selecting the one with the highest pay.
Keywords Clustering, Social reinforcement, Information transmission, Employment, Labor, Networks
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Abstract During the medieval and early modern periods the Middle East lost its economic advantage relative to the West. Recent explanations of this historical phenomenon—called the Long Divergence—focus on these regions’ distinct political economy choices regarding religious legitimacy and limited governance. We study these features in a political economy model of the interactions between rulers, secular and clerical elites, and civil society. The model induces a joint evolution of culture and political institutions converging to one of two distinct stationary states: a religious and a secular regime. We then map qualitatively parameters and initial conditions characterizing the West and the Middle East into the implied model dynamics to show that they are consistent with the Long Divergence as well as with several key stylized political and economic facts. Most notably, this mapping suggests non-monotonic political economy dynamics in both regions, in terms of legitimacy and limited governance, which indeed characterize their history.
Keywords Legitimacy, Political economy, Religion, Institutions, Cultural transmission, Long divergence
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Abstract This paper develops a theoretical framework to think about employees' effort choices, and applies this framework to assess the ability of existing experimental designs to identify the effect of pay inequality on worker effort. The analysis shows that failure to control for a number of confounds—such as reciprocity towards the employer in multi-lateral gift-exchange games (vertical fairness), or the incentive to increase effort when feeling underpaid under piece rates (income targeting)—may lead to inaccurate interpretation of evidence of treatment effects. In light of these findings, the paper provides a set of recommendations on how to improve identification in the design of controlled experiments in the future.
Keywords Pay inequality, Effort, Laboratory experiments, Fairness, Reference dependence
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Abstract A common thread in the literature shows that an oil price shock can have a major impact on global economic conditions. We examine the global dimensions of changes to the global oil price and world economic uncertainty using three model types: ordinary least square (OLS); general additive model (GAM); and non-linear vector autoregression (VAR) model with local projections (LP). Our study highlights a positive and statistically significant effect of oil prices on economic uncertainty during non-expansionary periods, yet the impact is negative on economic uncertainty during periods of economic growth. Using a VAR-LP we analyze the global dimensions of a world oil price shock on global economic conditions and investigate whether there is consistency in how an oil price shock influences economic growth, consumer prices and economic uncertainty based on the state of economic conditions. The empirical evidence shows that during an expansionary (a non-expansionary) period, the impact of an oil price shock lowers (elevates) economic uncertainty. The empirical evidence from the three model types taken together indicate a presence of state dependence on the influence of an oil price shock.
Keywords Oil prices, Business Cycles, World Economic Uncertainty
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Abstract We use data from Pakistan to establish a reciprocal exchange relationship between the judiciary and the government. We document large transfers in the form of expensive real estate from the government to the judiciary, and reciprocation in the form of pro-government rulings from the judiciary to the government. Our estimates indicate that the allocation of houses to judges increases pro-government rulings and reduces decisions on case merits. The allocation also incurs a cumulative cost of 0.03% of GDP to the government. However, it allows the government to expropriate additional land worth 0.2% of GDP in one year.
Keywords Reciprocation, Corruption, Pakistan, Judges, Law
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Abstract Given that poor individuals face worse survival conditions than non-poor individuals, one can expect that a steeper income gradient in mortality leads, through stronger income-based selection, to a lower poverty rate at the old age (i.e. the "missing poor" hypothesis). This paper uses U.S. state-level data on poverty at age 65+ and life expectancy by income levels to provide an empirical test of the missing poor hypothesis. Using average temperature as an instrument for mortality differentials, we show that instrumented changes in mortality differentials have a negative and statistically significant effect on old-age poverty: a 1 % increase in the mortality differential implies a 16 % decrease in the 65+ headcount poverty rate. Using those regression results, we compute hypothetical old-age poverty rates while neutralizing the impact of the income gradient in mortality, and show that correcting for heterogeneity in income-based selection effects modifies the comparison of old-age poverty prevalence across states.
Keywords Poverty, Measurement, Income gradient in mortality, Selection biases, Comparability
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Abstract In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data‐generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence‐generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty—nonstandard errors (NSEs). We study NSEs by letting 164 teams test the same hypotheses on the same data. NSEs turn out to be sizable, but smaller for more reproducible or higher rated research. Adding peer‐review stages reduces NSEs. We further find that this type of uncertainty is underestimated by participants.
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Abstract We expand the theory of politician quality in electoral democracies with citizen candidates by supposing that performance while in office sends a signal to the voters about the politician’s valence. Individuals live two periods and decide to become candidates when young, trading off against type-specific private wages. The valence signal increases the reelection chances of high valence incumbents (screening mechanism of reelection), and thus their expected gain from running for office (self-selection mechanism). Since self-selection improves the average quality of challengers, voters become more demanding when evaluating the incumbent’s performance. This complementarity between the self-selection and the screening mechanisms may lead to multiple equilibria. We show that more difficult and/or less variable political jobs increase the politicians’ quality. Conversely, societies with more wage inequality have lower quality polities. We also show that incumbency advantage blurs the screening mechanism by giving incumbents an upper-hand in electoral competition and may wipe out the positive effect of the screening mechanism on the quality of the polity.
Keywords Endogenous candidates, Political accountability, Incumbency advantage
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