Research

Working Papers

"Time-varying agglomeration economies and aggregate wage growth" (with Clémence Berson, Pierre-Philippe Combes, Laurent Gobillon)  Bank of France Working Paper n° 939 (2024)

We quantify the effects of city agglomeration economies on labour earnings in France over a forty-year period using individual wage panel data. We first delineate cities at every date to consider changes in their footprint over time. We then estimate a daily wage specification that includes time-varying city effects while controlling for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity. We regress these city effects on agglomeration variables every year, and assess how changes in values and returns to agglomeration variables affect the evolution of daily wages. We find a negligible role for changes in values, but an important role for changes in returns. There is also significant heterogeneity across cities, even among large cities of similar sizes. We propose a theoretical model in which agglomeration economies affect both population and city area. A calibration exercise shows that changes in returns to agglomeration economies are not enough to generate variations in population and city area influencing significantly aggregate labour earnings. This result is consistent with the negligible role of changes in values found in our empirical investigation.

"Regional Income Distributions in France, 1960-2018" (with Florian Bonnet),  Bank of France Working Paper n° 832 (2021)

This paper proposes homogeneous annual series on the income distribution of French metropolitan départements for the period 1960-69 and 1986-2018. We rely on unpublished and newly digitised archives of the French Ministry of Finance. They consist of fiscal tabulations that are a summary of households’ income tax declarations. Based on these raw sources, we interpolate the whole income distribution of French metropolitan départements after 1986. Before 1986, we need more assumptions as only households liable to French income tax filed income tax declarations at that time. We propose a methodology to estimate the number and average income of non-taxable households before 1986 that also allows us to reconstruct the income distribution of French metropolitan départements for the period 1960-69. 

"This Town Ain't Big Enough, Quantifying Local Public Goods Spillovers? " (with Nicolas Jannin), Bank of France Working Paper n° 796 (2020)

Despite long-standing theoretical interest, empirical attempts at investigating the appropriate level of decentralization remain scarce. This paper develops a simple and flexible framework to test for the presence of public good spillovers between fiscally autonomous jurisdictions and to investigate potential welfare gains from marginal fiscal integration. We build a quantitative spatial equilibrium model with many local jurisdictions, mobile households and endogenous local public goods causing spillovers across jurisdictional boundaries. We show how one can exploit migration and housing price responses to shocks in local public goods at different geographic scales to reveal the intensity of spillovers. Applying our framework to the particularly fragmented French institutional setting, we structurally estimate the model using a unique combination of municipal administrative panel datasets. Estimation relies on plausibly exogenous variations in government subsidies to instrument changes in the supply of public goods. We find that public goods in a municipality account for 4-11% of the local public good bundle enjoyed by its residents, and that public goods in each neighbor municipality account for an average 3.2-3.5% of this bundle. Finally, we simulate the effect of a reform increasing fiscal integration and find substantial welfare gains.

Work in progress

"Urban Heat Islands and Inequalities: Evidence from French Cities", with Céline Grislain-Letremy and Julie Sixou.

"Within- and between- city real income disparities", (with Pierre-Philippe Combes, Laurent Gobillon, Mylène Feuillade and Tanguy van Ypersele)

"Welfare effects of the no-interest loans in France" (with Gabrielle Fack and Laurent Gobillon)

"Structural Change and Spatial Inequalities: Evidence from the Evolution of High-Income Regional Dispersion in France since 1960" (with Florian Bonnet and Hippolyte d'Albis)

Publications in French

"Les inégalités de revenu entre les départements depuis cent ans",  (with Florian Bonnet and Hippolyte d'Albis), Économie et Statistique 2021

Cet article analyse l’évolution des inégalités spatiales de revenu entre les départements de la France métropolitaine depuis 1922. La contribution la plus notable est la reconstruction du revenu fiscal moyen par département, avant et après paiement de l’impôt sur le revenu, grâce à une exploitation inédite d’archives du ministère des Finances. Nous observons les faits stylisés suivants : (i) une très forte baisse des inégalités interdépartementales de revenu fiscal moyen sur un siècle, avec deux périodes de baisse continue, entre 1922 et 1939 et depuis 1948 ; (ii) une contribution significative, mais variable dans le temps, de l’impôt sur le revenu à la baisse des inégalités interdépartementales ; (iii) une amélioration de la situation relative de tous les départements se trouvant sous une ligne allant du Calvados au Gard depuis 1948. 

Unpublished

Policy Papers, Opinion Pieces and Briefs