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...

International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate poverty at a global level. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for all those (individuals and governments)...

This paper describes a series of algorithms that are used to compute optimal policy under full and imperfect information. Firstly we describe how to obtain linear quadratic (LQ) approximations to a nonlinear optimal policy problem. We develop novel algorithms that are required as a result of...

La crise a affecté les comportements de l'épargnant : les ménages français se sont montrés en moyenne plus « prudents », désirant épargner davantage dans des placements plus sûrs et à plus long terme, et limiter parallèlement leurs investissements risqués. Comment expliquer ce...