The continuous innovation process experienced by the information technology industries over the last decades has caused the price of computer power to decrease dramatically. This has led many firms to invest massively in increasingly efficient computers. This paper is an attempt to assess the...

We estimate a conditional convergence equation derived from an augmented Solow model where human capital is defined as skilled labour. We implement Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators on a panel of countries. Estimation is carried out on the model in levels instrumented by the lagged...

We estimate the technology of air pollution abatement, defined as a relation between conventional production, emissions and the inputs specifically allocated to the environmental protection. We use original firm-level data on both air emissions and investments in abatement equipment. We deal...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of environmental regulations on the location choices by French firms of their industrial activities. We examine a sample of 3,856 import flows of French firms from foreign industrial subsidiaries in 1999. We first observe that the most pollution...

The paper aims at assessing the net impact of the accumulation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) capital on the economy. In a first part, focusing on the supply-side of the economy, we show that the growth accounting methodology cannot provide us with a measure of the net...

Government balances are often adjusted for changes in economic activity in order to draw a clearer picture of the underlying fiscal situation and to use this as a guide to fiscal policy analysis. International organisations estimate the cyclical component of economic activity by the current...

In 1997, a new legislation banning below-invoice retail prices came into force in France. Individually negotiated discounts could no longer be passed on to consumers, which is equivalent to allowing industry-wide price oors. The anti-competitive effects of such practices are well-known. The...

This paper investigates the substitution possibilities in the production function between capital and two labour inputs, skilled and unskilled workers. We estimate a very general system of factor demand at the firm level, using original panel data obtained by merging three different sources. We...

This paper provides an empirical analysis at the firm level of the link between international trade and employment, for French manufacturing firms across the period 1986-1992, for which homogenous data are available. Firms constantly involved in international trade throughout the period...

We use microdata to examine the existence of downward wage rigidity in France, during the second half of the 90s. We use three annual datasets : a sample of the Déclarations Annuelles de Données Sociales, the Fiscal Income Survey and the Labour Force Survey. The first two sources, compiled on...