Investment of French firms remained weak in the first part of the 90's, after allowing for the sluggish economic growth. Macroeconomic models failed to explain this low level. In this work, we examine the link between micro-level data and aggregate fluctuations. We first describe the evolution...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the irreversibility of the retirement decision on labour supply after 60. According to the theory, when the retirement decision is an absorbing state, people tend to remain longer on the labour market to be able to benefit from changes in...

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...

Today, working in the industrialized countries is mainly a matter of middle-aged people (25 to 54 year old). This is particularly true in France where the participation rate for the less than 25 year old people is the smallest one in OECD countries and that for men older than 54 one of the...

In connection with a surge in the "new economy" that is statistically difficult to measure, doubts have been cast both on European growth and its comparability with that of the United States. This article explores measurement problems in the French case. The data at current prices seem to be...

We use household income tax data to estimate a structural model of female labor supply and utilization of paid child care outside the home. We find that child care costs have little impact on the participation decision of mothers of young children. However, they influence hours of work, as well...

In this paper, we estimate and analyse a set of equations of French inflation for forecasting purpose at the horizon of three months, six months and one year. A different equation is associated to each horizon. This approach has the advantage of modeling directly the variable of interest at the...

A better understanding of matrimonial behaviour in France is a first step to study the impact of family histories on global fecondity or the interactions between family behaviour and economic choices (labor supply, saving, housing, ...). The purpose of this paper is to describe such behaviours...

We model the demand for private annuities following Yaari (1965). In the line of Brown (1999) we define an Annuity Equivalent Wealth (AEW) that reflects the fact that an annuity provides a greater utility to a risk adverse individual than an actuarially equivalent lump sum. This indicator...

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...