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Many previous studies have shown that skilled and educated women have fewer children. By comparing twins and close siblings in Swedish register data, we show that the negative association between human capital and fertility mostly reflects family background factors. For males, human capital measures are unrelated to fertility in the overall population, but this again masks the influence of family background factors as high-skilled males tend to have more children than their less-skilled twins or siblings. Hence, family background factors have a strong negative impact on the overall association between human capital measures and fertility for both women and men. Non-cognitive abilities deviate from these patterns—these abilities remain strongly complementary to fertility both within and across families. Our results can be reconciled with a stylized model where family-specific preferences for fertility are shared across generations and shape investments in skills and traits when children are young.

Short-time work programs were revived by the Great Recession. To understand their operating mechanisms, we first provide a model showing that short-time work may save jobs in firms hit by strong negative revenue shocks, but not in less severely-hit firms, where hours worked are reduced, without saving jobs. The cost of saving jobs is low because short-time work targets those at risk of being destroyed. Using extremely detailed data on the administration of the program covering the universe of French establishments, we devise a causal identification strategy based on the geography of the program that demonstrates that short-time work saved jobs in firms faced with large drops in their revenues during the Great Recession, in particular when highly levered, but only in these firms. The measured cost per saved job is shown to be very low relative to that of other employment policies.

Abstract We reconsider the potential for explaining inter‐industry wage differences by decomposing those differences into parts due to individual and employer heterogeneity, respectively. Using longitudinally linked employer‐employee data, we estimate the model for the United States and France. The part arising from individual heterogeneity can be theoretically and empirically related to the worker’s opportunity wage rate. The part arising from employer heterogeneity can similarly be related to product market quasi‐rents and relative bargaining power. We find that these two variables are highly correlated with both parts of the differential in France. Although the U.S. inter‐industry wage differentials are strongly correlated with those in France, the decomposition is more nuanced in the American data, where the opportunity wage rate and the product market conditions are related to both the personal and employer heterogeneity. JEL codes J31, J50, L10

International audience; Les auteurs résument les résultats de travaux récents de micro-économétrie sur l'évaluation des effets des politiques d'emploi sur l'emploi des jeunes en France. Ils s'intéressent surtout à trois types de politiques : les plans d'emploi des jeunes destinés aux jeunes sans emploi et à formation de faible niveau, la formation "sur le tas", et les subventions aux travailleurs touchant un salaire minimum. Les programmes de stages pour les jeunes sans emploi n'ont en général aucun effet sur les salaires obtenus après les stages ou sur les probabilités d'emploi. Au contraire, la réduction des coûts d'emploi a des effets significatifs sur les probabilités d'emploi des travailleurs à bas salaires. Cependant ces effets s'avèrent plus importants pour les travailleurs âgés de 25 à 30 ans.

International audience; We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers from more than five hundred thousand employing firms. We decompose real total annual compensation per worker into components related to observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual variation. Except for the residual, all components may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. At the level of the individual, we find that person effects, especially those not related to observables like education, are a very important source of wage variation in France. Firm effects, while important, are not as important as person effects. At the level of firms, we find that enterprises that hire high-wage workers are more productive but not more profitable. They are also more capital and high-skilled employee intensive. Enterprises that pay higher wages, controlling for person effects, are more productive and more profitable. They are also more capital intensive but are not more high-skilled labor intensive. We find that person effects explain about 90% of inter-industry wage differentials and about 75% of the firm-size wage effect while firm effects explain relatively little of either differential.

Using individual data on compensation, matched with establishment and firm data on performance and inputs, we compare the French and American pay systems. The compensation measures are decomposed into components related to measured individual characteristics, establishment–enterprise effects, and a residual. In France, the compensation outcomes are more compressed than in the United States. For France, individual characteristics and establishment effects explain more of the variability in compensation outcomes than in the United States. The observable and unobservable components of compensation are identically correlated in the two countries. The relations among compensation components (individual and establishment) and firm performance outcomes (value-added per worker, sales per worker, and profit per unit of capital) exhibit some important similarities and differences between the countries. Higher paid workers, either because of individual characteristics or establishment effects, are employed in firms that are more productive. Higher pay due to enterprise heterogeneity is associated with higher profitability in France but lower profitability in the United States. J. Japan Int. Econ. December 2001, 15(4), pp. 419–436. Department of Labor Economics, Cornell University, 259 Ives Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853–3901, CREST and NBER; CREST-INSEE, 15, bd Gabriel Peri, 92245 Malakoff Cedex, France, CEPR and IZA; LAMIA-TEAM, Universite de Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, 106–112, bd de l'Hopital, 75647 Paris Cedex 13, France, and Crest; and Department of Economics, University of Missouri–Columbia, 118 Professional Bldg., Columbia, Missouri 65211. © 2001 Elsevier Science (USA). Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J31, D21.

How does international trade affect the risk exposure of firms and countries? Trade induces specialization, thus increasing economies' exposure to idiosyncratic supply shocks. But greater geographic diversification in trade destinations offers natural hedging properties against demand shocks. In this paper, we offer an integrated economic and econometric view of the impact of trade on firms and countries volatility. Exporters' volatility is shown to directly depend on the (lack of) diversification in their portfolio of clients. Indeed, most exporters, including the largest, have one or two main clients that dwarf the others. This structure of trade networks implies that individual exporters are strongly exposed to microeconomic demand shocks. The concentration of trade flows further implies that such risk does not wash out across firms, thus contributing to aggregate fluctuations.

This thesis studies how firms meet and match with their potential buyers in international markets. Buyers accumulation abroad is a crucial component of exporters growth: sales to new buyers explain almost 50% of firms' export growth rate heterogeneity in the medium run. Yet, in international markets, heightened geographical and cultural distances exacerbate search and information frictions making it harder for firms to match with potential buyers. This thesis quantifies the role of search, financial, and network barriers faced by firms while willing to match with buyers abroad.To investigate this question this thesis relies on a unique data set covering the universe of intra-EU trade relationships of French firms in which buyers of French firms are identified. More precisely, for each transaction, the exporting firm, the product and value of the flow as well as the buyer through its European VAT number are recorded.The first chapter explores how search frictions in international good markets distort competition between firms of heterogeneous productivity. The second chapter studies the role of liquidity constraints in preventing firms from expanding their customer base. The last chapter paper investigates the role of managers' networks for the acquisition of buyers in international markets., Cette thèse étudie la rencontre et l’appariement entre les entreprises françaises et leurs acheteurs sur les marchés internationaux. La constitution d'un portefeuille d'acheteurs à l'étranger est une composante cruciale de la croissance des exportateurs: les ventes vers de nouveaux acheteurs expliquent près de 50% des différences de taux de croissance à l’export entre les entreprises françaises à moyen terme. Pourtant, sur les marchés internationaux, l'éloignement géographique, les différences culturelles et institutionelles exacerbent les difficultés qu'ont les entreprise à trouver leurs acheteurs potentiels, Rauch (2001), Allen (2014) et Arkolakis (2010). Cette thèse étudie et quantifie l'effet des obstacles informationnels et contraintes financières auxquels les entreprises sont confrontées lorsqu'elles démarchent des acheteurs à l'étrangers.Cette thèse s'appuie sur des données exhaustives détaillant l'ensemble des exportations intracommunautaires françaises sur les vingt dernières années. En particulier pour chaque transaction, l'entreprise française exportatrice, le produit et le montant de la transaction ainsi que l'acheteur par son numéro de TVA introcommunautaire sont identifiés.Le premier chapitre examine comment les frictions de recherche sur les marchés internationaux des biens peuvent fausser la concurrence entre entreprises à productivité hétérogène. Le deuxième chapitre étudie le rôle des contraintes de liquidité dans la construction d’une base de clientèle à l’étranger. Le dernier chapitre étudie l’importance du réseau et des contacts des managers dans l’expansion des entreprises à l'export.

The main objective of this thesis is to study the interdependence of school resources and individual resources in human capital production. In three empirical analyses using French data, various methods arc proposed to evaluate the impact of educational policies, taking individual behaviors into account. The first chapter shows that compensatory education policies may result in individual sorting. The fact that socially more advantaged families tend to avoid treated schools cancels out additional resources positive effects on academic achievement. The second chapter examines whether pupils are constrained by local school supply. We find that opening a new high school increases the proportion of pupils who continue in upper secondary education, particularly in a vocational track. Studying how students evaluate teaching, the third chapter shows that they take contemporaneous information about their grades into account when they evaluate teachers' pedagogical qualities., L'objectif de cette thèse est d'étudier l'interdépendance des ressources scolaires et des ressources individuelles dans la production du capital humain. À travers trois cas d'études sur données françaises, différentes méthodes sont proposées pour analyser l'effet des politiques éducatives tout en tenant compte des comportements des individus. Le premier chapitre montre que les politiques d'éducation prioritaire sont susceptibles de conduire les familles, notamment les plus avantagées socialement, à contourner les établissements traités. Ces stratégies d'évitement sont de nature à contrebalancer les effets des moyens supplémentaires sur les résultats des élèves. Le deuxième chapitre cherche à savoir si les choix d'orientation des élèves sont contraints par J'offre scolaire locale. Nous montrons que l'ouverture d'un nouveau lycée augmente la proportion d'élèves qui poursuivent leurs études dans le second cycle, notamment en voie professionnelle. Enfin, le troisième chapitre montre que les étudiants tiennent compte de l'information contemporaine dont ils disposent sur leurs notes lorsqu'ils évaluent les qualités pédagogiques de leurs enseignants.

This paper analyzes the consequences of compulsory reductions in working time on employment. The first part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of labor demand when the firm chooses the number of jobs and hours. This framework allows us to show that compulsory reductions in standard hours can increase employment only if wage compensation is sufficiently low. Then, the second part of the paper looks at the determinants of wages, hours and employment in different frameworks: perfect competition, collective bargaining, monopsony. It is shown that regulation of hours is justified and can even increase employment when competition is imperfect. However, compulsory reductions in working hours cannot systematically improve employment and welfare.

This paper analyzes the consequences of compulsory reductions in working time on employment. The first part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of labor demand when the firm chooses the number of jobs and hours. This framework allows us to show that compulsory reductions in standard hours can increase employment only if wage compensation is sufficiently low. Then, the second part of the paper looks at the determinants of wages, hours and employment in different frameworks: perfect competition, collective bargaining, monopsony. It is shown that regulation of hours is justified and can even increase employment when competition is imperfect. However, compulsory reductions in working hours cannot systematically improve employment and welfare.