Measures of urban productivity are typically positivelyassociated with city population. But is this relationship causal? Wediscuss the main sources of bias in the proper identification of agglomerationeffects. We also assess a variety of solutions that have beenproposed in the literature to deal...

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two explanations have been offered:agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity) and firmselection (larger cities toughen competition allowing only the most productive to survive). Todistinguish...

In this paper, we study the mobility and housing choices of the elderly when retiringusing household data collected in France. From a theoretical viewpoint, retirees are likely todecrease their housing quantity because of an income loss when retiring, but they may alsoincrease it to benefit from...

While most of the literature on employment protection has focused on government-mandated severance pay, it has recently been documented that a substantial share of severance payments derives from private contracts or collective agreements. This paper studies the determination of these payments....

This study evaluates the impact of an increase in childcare subsidies on the use of paid childcare and the participation rate of mothers of preschool children. We use a natural experiment provided by the PAJE, a French reform in family allowances introduced in 2004. This reform temporarily...

The assumption that consumers are fully rational and hold correct expectations over prices is demanding in dynamic settings. We claim that it is testable provided that market-level data on prices and purchases are available. We find that consumers hold simple expectations on the timing of...

The basic assumption of a structural VARMA model (SVARMA) is that it is driven by a white noise whose components are uncorrelated (or independent) and are interpreted as economic shocks, called "structural" shocks. These models have to face two kinds of identification problems. The first...

We analyze the effects of large war episodes (world wars) on the macroeconomic dynamics of four advanced countries (France, Germany, the UK and the U.S.) using a structural small open economy model estimated with Bayesian techniques. Our dataset is taken from Piketty and Zucman (2014) and goes...

We consider a simple tournament model in which individuals auto-select into the contest

(reflecting temporary deviations from observed levels). The model predicts that