Antoine Boucher
This paper investigates the long-run impact of 19th-century politicization and political repression on electoral outcomes by exploiting the natural experiment along the 1815-1860 border separating France from the Duchy of Savoy and the Nice County. Thanks to a spatial discontinuity design, I estimate the legacy of the early 19th-century politicization and the 1851 political repression against Republicans in southeastern France on electoral outcomes. Results suggest that these different historic trajectories translated into a preference for radical Republicans on the French side during the election of 1871. This preference persists until nowadays, as the French side voted more for left-wing candidates in both presidential and legislative elections between 1995 and 2022. Using first-hand archives data on repressed citizens, results indicate that political repression was ineffective since it failed to reverse the initial effects of early politicization. Further analyses suggest that repressed political dynasties, emigration generated by the repression, and a relatively unmixed population can explain how and why these historic events continue to influence electoral results.
Julien DUC
Job market paper abstract: Most models studying monetary policy assume inflation to be exogenously set by a monetary authority without modeling agent’s incentives for providing liquidity. I show that these incentives matter by constructing a model of monetary exchange of inside and outside money. Agents are subject to ex-post idiosyncratic preference shocks creating heterogenous liquidity needs. Agents have access to a money issuance technology to insure against preference shocks at a fixed cost. I explicitly model agents’ incentives to issue inside money and study its coexistence with outside money in equilibrium. I show that access to inside money issuance has an ambiguous impact on welfare. I then introduce seigniorage revenue and endogenize inflation given agent’s incentives to issue. The model highlights a fundamental role of money demand in implementing inflation. When liquidity is easily available, equilibrium inflation rate is zero and seigniorage plays no fundamental role in equilibrium allocations. When liquidity is relatively costly, a certain range of inflation or deflation rates is implementable.
Wenliang Li
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-Z_-psEPzuWox41ii2Jb_W2bacBo4MH/view?usp=sharing
Job market paper abstract: Why is structural bonus found to be slight during China’s post-reform era? This paper explains the puzzle by exploiting the heterogeneity in the patterns of structural change across Chinese provinces. Using an original database covering production and factor inputs in 8 sectors and 31 provinces over 1993-2016, I show that only those provinces where labour was reallocated from agriculture to manufacturing and services benefited from a structural bonus in terms of labour productivity growth. In other provinces, the structural effect was minimal or negative. Extending the analysis to TFP growth, I find that both labour and capital reallocation have played a limited role. Labour reallocation has little potential as marginal labour returns are close across sectors. Capital reallocation has large potential but remains restrained, suggesting substantial reallocation frictions. China’s TFP growth is mostly explained by within-sector technological progress, which has been vanishing since 2008, leading to a declining TFP growth.
Léopold Monjoie
Job market paper abstract: This paper examines the challenges of allocating a good subject to capacity constraints, when considering consumer preferences and investment decisions. A theoretical framework is developed where a market designer sequentially chooses a level of investment and proposes an allocation mechanism to consumers followed by a consumption stage. The market designer uses the allocation to maximize consumer surplus and finance the investment cost. He faces heterogeneous consumers who have private information about their demand level and belong to a publicly observed category. We show that the lack of complete information about consumer utility and constraints on the implementable mechanism leads to specific relations between the optimal allocation mechanism and the level of investment. Namely, we find that the optimal allocation implies discriminating consumers based on their types and that discrimination depends on the level of investment considered. This implies that the most efficient mechanism is not always Pareto-improving for every consumer. This has significant welfare and distributive implications. We first study the benchmark case with complete information. We then analyze the current second-best situation, in which the market designer cannot obtain information about consumers and must choose fixed prices ex-ante. In the third step, we describe the optimal theoretical second-best allocation mechanism that considers the incentive and individual rationality constraints and the investment decisions.
Matteo Neri-Lainé
International insecurity can severely disrupt trade. This paper studies treaties aimed at preventing such insecurity: military alliances. Taking a structural gravity approach based on a sample of 6,972 country pairs from 1967 to 2012, we show that alliances increase trade by 60% on average. Yet, the effects of military alliances are highly heterogeneous. They depend to a large extent on the type of alliance and the sensitivity of economies to trade costs. We use robustness tests and the instrumental variables strategy to confirm the causal interpretation of the results. Investigating the mechanism behind the impacts of military alliances, we demonstrate that alliances increase trade by reducing international insecurity. General equilibrium analysis moreover shows that the growth in trade generated by military alliances brings substantial welfare gains for signatories and losses for non-aligned countries.
Mathilde Sage
Job market paper abstract: This study examines whether the prevalent lack of inheritance rights for widows in Africa contributes to high and early fertility. Using a natural experiment in Namibia, I estimate the impact of a reform improving widows’ inheritance rights on fertility behaviors. Results indicate that the reform led to a 24% decrease in the annual birth rate, equivalent to a reduction of one child over a woman’s reproductive life. Additionally, the reform postponed the onset of fertility, delaying the average age at first birth by 5.5 months and reducing the likelihood to have a first birth before 23 by 7.3 percentage points. I provide suggestive evidence that the widowhood insurance motive for fertility contributes not only to high fertility rates but also to early childbirth. In contexts where the widowhood risk may materialize at a young age due to large age gap between partners and to survival rates favouring women, women anticipate the need to have a financially independent child by their 40’s. Such findings suggest that protecting widows inheritance rights could be a novel low-cost policy lever to delay early childbearing in low-income contexts.
Placement on the job market in the past years :
Ghassan Benmir (2023) Assistant professor IE University and IE Business School, Madrid, Spain.
Yohan Renard (2023) Maître de conférences (a tenured position), University of Orléans, France.
Antonio de Melo (2023) Post-doctoral researcher, University of Torino, Italy.
Doriane Mignon (2023) Research fellow, Division of Population Health, Health services research and primary care, University of Manchester, UK.
Arthur Juet (2023) Research fellow, University of Leeds, UK.
Benoit Carré (2023) Post-doctoral researcher, University of Southern-Denmark.
Thomas Thivillon (2023) Post-doctoral researcher, Bordeaux School of Economics, University of Bordeaux, France.
Eugénie Joltreau (2022) Post-doctoral researcher, RFM-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, Rome, Italy.
Émy Lécuyer (2022), Post-doctoral researcher, Université de Rouen, France. Since 2023, Maitre de conférences (a tenured position), Paris-Cité University, France.
Josselin Roman (2022) Economist, Joint Research Center European Commission, Brussels, Belgium.
Morgan Patty (2022) Maître de conférences (a tenured position), École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, France.
Tristan Jourde (2021): Economist, Banque de France.
Arnold Njike (2021): Maître de conférences (a tenured position), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France.
Noémie Cabau (2020): Post-doctoral researcher, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary.
Sultan Mehmood (2020): Assistant professor, New Economic School, Moscow, Russia.
