Publications

La plupart des informations présentées ci-dessous ont été récupérées via RePEc avec l'aimable autorisation de Christian Zimmermann
Rent Creation and Rent Sharing: New Measures and Impacts on Total Factor ProductivityJournal articleGilbert Cette, Jimmy Lopez et Jacques Mairesse, Economic Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 4, pp. 1915-1938, 2019

This analysis proposes new measures of rent creation and rent sharing and assesses their impact on productivity on cross‐country‐industry panel data. We find first that: (1) anticompetitive product market regulations positively affect rent creation and (2) employment protection legislation boosts hourly wages, particularly for low‐skill workers. However, we find no significant impact of this employment legislation on rent sharing, as the hourly wage increases are offset by a negative impact on hours worked. Second, using regulation indicators as instruments, we find that rent creation and rent sharing both have a substantial negative impact on total factor productivity. (JEL E22, E24, O30, L50, O43, O47, C23)

De Mario Draghi à Christine Lagarde : l’essence du monopole d’émission restera inchangéeJournal articleAntoine Gentier, Journal des libertés, Issue 7, pp. 67-87, 2019

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39th French Health Economists Days : IntroductionJournal articleCarine Franc, Alain Paraponaris et Bruno Ventelou, Revue d'économie politique, Volume 129, Issue 4, pp. 441-445, 2019

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Epidemiological Transition and the Wealth of Nations: the Case of HIV/AIDS in a Microsimulation ModelJournal articleYves Arrighi et Bruno Ventelou, Revue d'économie politique, Volume 129, Issue 4, pp. 591-618, 2019

This paper aims at quantifying the effect of healthcare programs on economic outcomes in the context of developing countries experiencing epidemiological transitions. It is widely accepted in the literature that treatment programs result in production gains among ill-health workers. However, these programs have the additional effect of modifying both the size and the composition of the working population by increasing the proportion of chronically-ill individuals. First, we define the theoretical conditions under which this macro-epidemiological phenomenon outweighs the positive effect of an increase in production. Second, we decompose the economic consequences of access to antiretroviral treatments against HIV in three sub-Saharan African countries. Forecasts of an individual’s health status, depending on whether he or she has access to medication, are generated using a microsimulation model. We use the model to generate a counterfactual (as if the adverse epidemiological effect did not exist), which allows decomposing the total impact of the HIV-medicines program into two different effects: positive and negative. We find that the positive effect of treatment procurement outweighs the negative epidemiological effect. Of course, this approach is only an indicator of economic performance and should in no way constitute a decision-making criterion about the ethical necessity of access to health care.

Maurice Allais on the quantity theory of money: the ontological restatementJournal articleRamzi Klabi, Journal of Economic Methodology, Volume 26, Issue 4, pp. 361-379, 2019

This paper is about a little known part of Allais’ oeuvre, namely his restatement of the quantity theory of money. It shows that this restatement contains an original refinement of the notion of stability of the relative demand for money. To explain this refinement, this essay investigates Allais’ concept of psychological time – a concept strongly emphasised but not duly examined by most of his commentators. It shows how Allais’ restatement of the quantity theory amounts – in the final analysis – to a theory of time. It explores an analogy, Allais mentioned, between his quantity theory and the theory of relativity in physics, revealing thereby the ontological nature of this restatement.

Immigrants' Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994-2012Journal articleEva Moreno-Galbis, Jérémy Tanguy, Ahmed Tritah et Catherine Laffineur, Industrial Relations, Volume 58, Issue 4, pp. 623-673, 2019

Over the period 1994–2012, immigrants’ wage growth in France outperformed that of natives. We investigate to what extent changes in task-specific returns to skills contributed to this wage dynamics differential through two channels: changes in the valuation of skills (price effect) and occupational sorting (quantity effect). We find that the wage growth premium of immigrants is mainly explained by the progressive reallocation of immigrants toward tasks whose returns increase over time. Immigrants seem to have taken advantage of labor demand restructuring driven by globalization and technological changes.

Optimal provision of a public good with costly exclusionJournal articleNicolas Gravel et Michel Poitevin, Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 117, Issue C, pp. 451-460, 2019

We examine the problem of providing a non-rival and excludable public good to individuals with the same preferences and differing contributing capacities. Exclusion from the public good is costly in the sense that if two different quantities of the public good are consumed in the community, then the sum of the costs of providing the two quantities must be borne. By contrast, costless exclusion only requires the cost of the largest quantity consumed of the public good to be financed. We show that despite its important cost, providing public goods in different quantities is often part of any optimal provision of public good when the public authority is imperfectly informed about the agents' contributive capacities. In the specific situation where individuals have an additively separable logarithmic utility function, we provide a complete characterization of the optimal exclusion structure in the two-type case. We also show that the preference for such a costly exclusion is more likely when the heterogeneity in the population or income is large, and when the aversion to utility inequality is important.

Bubble on real estate: the role of altruism and fiscal policyJournal articleLise Clain-Chamosset-Yvrard et Thomas Seegmuller, Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp. 20190020, 2019

In this paper, we are interested in the interplay between real estate bubble, aggregate capital accumulation and taxation in an overlapping generations economy with altruistic households. We consider a three-period overlapping generations model with three key elements: altruism, portfolio choice, and financial market imperfections. Households realise different investment decisions in terms of asset at different periods of life, face a binding borrowing constraint and leave bequests to their children. We show that altruism plays a key role on the existence of a productive real estate bubble, i.e. a bubble in real estate raising physical capital stock and aggregate output. The key mechanism relies on the fact that a real estate bubble raises income of retired households. Because of higher bequests, there children are able to invest more in productive capital. Introducing fiscal policy, we show that raising real estate taxation dampens capital accumulation.

Real Estate Prices and Corporate Investment: Theory and Evidence of Heterogeneous Effects across FirmsJournal articleDenis Fougère, Rémy Lecat et Simon Ray, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Volume 51, Issue 6, pp. 1503-1546, 2019

In this paper, we investigate the effect of real estate prices on productive investment. We build a theoretical framework of firms' investment with credit rationing and real estate collateral. We show that real estate prices affect firms' borrowing capacities through two channels. An increase in real estate prices raises the value of the firms' pledgeable assets and mitigates the agency problem characterizing the creditor–entrepreneur relationship. It simultaneously cuts the expected profit due to the increase in the cost of inputs. We test our theoretical predictions using a large French database. We do find heterogeneous effects of real estate prices on productive investment depending on the position of the firms in the sectoral distributions of real estate holdings.

The January effect in the foreign exchange market: Evidence for seasonal equity carry tradesJournal articleEric Girardin et Fatemeh Salimi Namin, Economic Modelling, Volume 81, Issue C, pp. 422-439, 2019

In this study, we investigate monthly seasonality in the foreign exchange market. Given the well-known recurrent higher returns in some month than in others in stock markets around the world, we consider it likely that a seasonal outperformance of a country’s stock market over another is associated with similar seasonal patterns in capital flows and exchange rates. A seasonal profit (carry trade) opportunity can be created by the simultaneous appreciation of a country’s currency and the outperformance of its stock market. By focusing on the world’s key currency pairs, the US dollar-Deutsche mark and the US dollar-euro, and by using a Markov-switching framework, we document persistent January and December effects in the foreign exchange market from 1971 to 2017. Analysis of the German-US stock returns differential and their bilateral capital flows reveal similar month effects in 65% of the whole sample.