The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad decision to learn, while two concern as well the choice...

How far has English already spread? How much further can we expect it to go? In response to the first question, this chapter tries to identify the areas of life where English already serves as a lingua franca in the world (more or less) and those where the language faces sharp competition and...

This paper estimates the causal impact of retirement among the 50-69 year-old on Body Mass Index (BMI), the probability of being either overweight or obese and the probability of being obese. Based on the 2004, 2006 and 2010-11 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe...

Housing subsidies to tenants are a main tool for housing policy in France. They aim to limit the budget share of housing for eligible tenants or to improve their housing conditions for a given budget share. Despite the increasing budget allocated to housing subsidies since the end of the 1970s,...

This paper examines the consequences of estimating a past-dependent (causal) AR model from data generated by a stationary noncausal process with a future-dependent component. We show that the outcomes of that estimation depend on the noncausal persistence. When the noncausal persistence is...

This paper deals with aggregation of estimators in the context of regression with fixed design, with heteroscedastic and subgaussian noise. We relate the task of aggregating a finite family of affine estimators to the concentration of quadratic forms of the noise vector, and we derive sharp...

Since the late 90s, regression discontinuity designs have been widely used to estimate local treatment effects. When the running variable is observed with continuous errors, identification fails even if the dispersion of measurement errors is small. Assuming non-differential measurement errors,...

This paper investigates how the ethnic gap in employment rates varies across skill levels. Instead of stratifying our sample in many dimensions (age groups, education levels...), we introduce a method that allows us to study the heterogeneity of binary outcomes with respect to all covariates at...

The increase of the expected lifetime, that is the longevity phenomenon, is accompanied by an increase of the number of seniors with a severe disability. Because of the significant costs of long term care facilities, it is important to analyze the time spent in long term care, as well as the...

In this paper, we explain why a nonparametric approach based on a betakernel [Renault, Scaillet (2004)] will lead to significant bias when appliedto recovery rate distributions. This is due to a specific feature of thesedistributions, which admit strictly positive weights at 100 %...