At the end of middle school, many low achieving students have to abandon hope of getting into selective high-school programs, which may be a source of disappointment and eventually lead them to dropout from high-school. Based on a randomized controlled trial, this paper shows that low-achieving...

We study interdependencies in spousal labor supply by exploiting the design of the French workweek reduction, which introduced exogenous variation in one's spouse's labor supply, at constant earnings. Treated employees work on average two hours less per week. Husbands of treated women respond by...

In France, secondary school teachers are evaluated every six or seven years by senior experts of the Ministry of education. These external evaluations mostly involve the supervision of one class session and a debriefing interview, but have nonetheless a direct impact on teachers' career...

In many countries, the termination of employment contracts has to be either on employer initiative or on employee initiative. Furthermore, the cost of the procedure is borne mainly by the contracting party who takes the initiative and there is little room for sharing costs. The implicit doctrine...

The famous events of May 1968, starting with student riots, threw France into a state of turmoil. The period of ?revolution? coincided with the time in which important examinations are undertaken. Normal procedures were abandoned and the pass-rate for various qualifications increased enormously....

Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty...

A mother's decision to participate in the labour market is correlated with those of the other mothers living in the same neighbourhood. This paper studies the extent to which this is causal. An identification problem exists because mothers with similar characteristics are often observed living...

It is difficult to know whether widening access to schools which provide a more academically oriented general education makes a difference to average educational achievement. We make use of reforms affecting admission to the 'high ability' track in Northern Ireland, but not England. The...

This paper exploits the collective pardon granted to individuals incarcerated in French prisons on the 14th of July, 1996 (Bastille Day) to identify the effect of collective sentence reductions on recidivism. The collective pardon generated a very significant discontinuity in the relationship...

The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and non-elite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of any further increase in its size. This paper presents a natural experiment...