The provision of utilities for all at an affordable price has long been regarded as a prerequisite for everyday life, generally guaranteed by the state. But in recent years, publicly-owned utilities throughout Europe have come under increasing fire for their poor performance - their lack of...

The paper compares poverty in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and France. We answer whether it is justifiable to talk about a unified Nordic model in terms of poverty and poverty alleviation. We have (1) descriptive/analytical and (2) methodological goals. (1) We pool the four Nordic countries...

France has experienced massive changes in its regulation of working time during the last decade. These changes generate natural experiments that may help to study a variety of issues in labor economics, including work sharing effect on job creation or productivity, labor relations or adaptation...

Econometric evaluations of public-sponsored training programmes generally find little evidence of an impact of such policies on transition rates out of unemployment. We perform the first evaluation of training effects for the unemployed adults in France, exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset...

In this paper we estimate by matching techniques the effects of a French retraining program on the reemployment rate of displaced workers. This program, called Conventions de conversion, was intended to improve reemployment prospects of displaced workers by proposing them retraining and job...