Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

Growth in international trade and globalization has been correlated in nearly all countries with a worsening of the less skilled labor situation relative to the skilled. In this empirical paper, I show that an important component of recent globalization in France has been a huge growth in...

Does entry regulation hinder job creation? We investigate this question in the context of the French retail industry, a sector that has experienced especially low rates of job creation over the last 25 years. Since the early 70s, the French government has required regional zoning board approval...

Institutions, social norms and the nature of industrial relations vary greatly between Latin American and Western European countries. Such institutional and organizational differences might shape firms operational environment in general and the type of competition in product and labor markets in...

In this paper, we present a dynamic model which explains output, enployment and energy consumption in the French manufacturing sector in terms of the expectedand actual path of wage rates and energy prices in units of output. The modelhas two distinguishing features: First, the rate of capacity...

We decompose the real annual full time compensation costs of 1.1 million French workers followed over 12 years into a part that reflects their external opportunity wage and a part that reflects their internal wage rate. Using these components of compensation we investigate the extent to which...

Our empirical analyses distinguish between flows of workers, directly measured, and job creation and destruction, again, directly measured. We use a representative sample of all French establishments for 1987 to 1990. Our most important findings are that (1) annual job creation can be...

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk. During the same period, the share of...

How does employer market power affect workers? We compute the concentration of new hires by occupation and commuting zone in France using linked employer-employee data. Using instrumental variables with worker and firm fixed effects, we find that a 10% increase in labor market concentration...