Though rates of intergenerational mobility are the same in the U.S. and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution – that should reflect at least in part those rates – differ substantially. We examine differences in mobility between the U.S. and France since the middle of the nineteenth...

This paper addresses the relationship between schooling and socioeconomic background, in particular parents’ education. We use an original survey conducted in 2003 in Senegal that provides instruments to deal with the endogeneity of background variables. These instruments describe the...

Dans cet article nous partons d'une vision de la firme comme définie par ses compétences afin d'analyser les transformations dans les modes de gestion de la main-d'œuvre et, en particulier, le développement récent de la flexibilité externe du travail au détriment des marchés internes....

French firms laying off workers aged 50 and above have to pay a tax to the unemployment insurance system, known as the Delalande tax. This is a rare case of experience rating in the European context. We evaluate its impact on layoffs as well as on hiring, taking advantage of several changes in...

Intertemporal correlation aversion is an intuitive concept indicating whether an individual prefers lotteries concerning consumption at different moments in time to be positively or negatively correlated. I show that the difference between the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the...

Le système public de retraite par répartition est un pilier de l'Etat Providence en France. Il se traduit par des transferts financiers des générations jeunes et actives vers les générations plus âgées et inactives. Lontgemps donné pour l'expression même de la solidarité entre...

In this paper we examine the share of the French men who exhibit stunted growth during the course of the 19th century. We use data collected on all men who were called up for possible conscription into the French army with the unit of analysis being the shares of 20 year old men in the...

In this paper, we examine the effects of the french government's 1990 reform of the farming sector on indiviuals' retirement behavior. This reform has induced different changes in the Social Security Wealth of farmers living in different rural areas, and thus provided a ``natural experiment''...

This paper reports the results from an experiment on two-unit sequential auctions with and without a buyer’s option (which gives the winner of the first auction the right to buy the second unit at the winning price). The demand for the two items is either decreasing, flat, or increasing. The 4...