This paper addresses the effect of horizontal mergers on prices. It is shown that if firms compete in quantities and marginal costs are nondecreasing, any profitable merger failing to generate technological synergies must harm consumers through higher prices, irrespective of entry conditions in...

The issue of how to allocate pollution permits is critical for the political sustainability of any cap-and-trade system. Under the objective of offsetting firms' losses resulting from the environmental regulation, we argue that the criteria for allocating free allowances must account for the...

This paper studies the effect of credit constraints on the expansion and survival of firms in foreign markets. It develops a model of the multi-country firm, in which, lower access to external finance, or reduced internal liquidity, hampers the firm ability to finance the recurrent costs to...

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus...

Using department level administrative data from 1826 to 1936 we document the evolution of crime rates in 19th century France and we estimate the impact of a negative income shock on crime. Our identification strategy exploits the phylloxera crisis. Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed...

We study compensation packages in family and non-family firms. Using French matched employer-employee data, we first show that family firms pay on average lower wages. We find that part of this wage gap is due to low wage workers sorting into family firms and high wage workers sorting into...

Drames privés ou question publique ? De quoi et de qui parle-t-on quand on parle de dépendance ? Le terme, d'origine médicale, désigne l'incapacité à accomplir sans aide les actes essentiels de la vie quotidienne, qui touche les handicapés, les malades chroniques, les vieillards infirmes...

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

La crise économique que nous traversons montre le rôle pivot des banques centrales dans les économies développées. Si elles se veulent les gardiennes discrètes de la stabilité des prix, cette crise souligne la nécessité de repenser plus globalement leur rôle. D'abord, elles n'ont pas...

Using the Public Use Microdata Files of the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses, we study the determinants of the assimilation of language minorities into the city majority language. We show that official minority members (i.e. francophones in English-speaking cities and anglophones in...