Research

Abstract:  We leverage detailed French administrative data encompassing employment, energy consumption, and firm performance within the manufacturing sector, to examine how firms adapt to variations in their energy costs. By integrating a dynamic panel methodology with a shift-share strategy, we distinguish the impacts of permanent versus transitory energy price shocks while dealing with price endogeneity. This distinction is key when using energy price shocks to evaluate the potential effects of carbon taxation, perceived as largely permanent. Our findings reveal that firms demonstrate a more pronounced response to permanent shocks compared to transitory ones, as evidenced by elasticities that are double in magnitude for the former. We explore these responses across four dimensions: energy consumption, emissions, firm performance (revenue and value-added), and labor demand. In the context of employment, our analysis uncovers divergent strategies adopted by firms: headcount adjustments are predominantly associated with permanent shocks, while changes in working hours are more common in response to transitory shocks. Furthermore, we apply our empirical results to assess the potential consequences of an increase in energy prices coming from heightened carbon taxation. This exercise suggests that such a policy would imply substantial labor reallocation, both between and within sectors, with heterogeneous effects on firms and employment zones

Abstract:  This study leverages French data to elucidate the considerable heterogeneity in energy efficiency across firms and its correlation with the substantial diversity in energy mixes both within and across sectors. We establish that there is a positive correlation at the firm level between the value-added per unit of labor and per unit of energy, which in turn fosters a direct positive relationship between firm's hiring rate and its energy value-added productivity. Building upon these empirical findings, we develop a structural search and matching model featuring large firms, each characterized by distinct labor and energy productivity levels, as well as varied energy mix. Utilizing this model, we analyze the impact of an increase in carbon taxation on the dynamic reallocation of labor. 

Abstract:  This paper evaluates how constraining are labor shortages for firms and markets. It exploits a French reform reducing the administrative cost of hiring migrants within a list of occupations suffering from a scarcity of local labor. Findings reveal that constrained firms react by hiring additional workers in target occupations, which allows them to grow in size, revenues and value added. At the aggregate market level, we show that his policy isn't not implemented at the expense of non-targeted firms or occupations and that it is able to reduce the severity of tightnesss. We introduce a search and matching model that allows us to quantify the efficiency gains of the reform. 

Abstract:  We develop and structurally estimate a quantitative model of firm-to-firm trade in which the interaction of search frictions and comparative advantages shapes the structure of trade networks, generates heterogeneous prices and markups across sellers and within a seller across its downstream partners, and determines the magnitude of the international transmission of shocks. We recover the parameters of the model using a structural strategy that exploits firms’ mobility along the network of French exporters, observed in firm-to-firm trade data. The estimated model is used to examine the incidence of domestic cost shocks on foreign partners, in the cross-section and over time. 

Abstract: A large fraction of the eligible unemployed workers do not claim for unemployment insurance (UI) and, among claimants, many do not register immediately upon layoff. To model both the selection into UI and the distribution of the duration until registration, this article provides a job search model with endogenous take-up. Estimating our model using French administrative data, we find substantial heterogeneity in both search and claiming frictions. If half of the sample faces high claiming frictions, many have good employment prospects and exit unemployment quickly. The burden of the claiming difficulties is thus concentrated on 10% of the sample that suffers both from claiming and job search frictions. For that reason, the alleviation of the complexity of the claiming process is likely to have very heterogenous effects but little effect on aggregate unemployment duration. Additionally we show that accounting for the endogeneity of take-up is important to measure the unemployment duration elasticities with respect to UI benefits.

Abstract: A large fraction of the eligible workers does not claim for unemployment benefits. The existing literature, focusing on the determinants of take-up (TU), has shown that it is sensitive to both the costs and the benefits of claiming. This paper shows that variation in TU behavior can be used to compute the claiming costs and to determine the workers' value of unemployment insurance (UI). Using Austrian data and exploiting a quasi-experimental setting, we first estimate how eligibility for severance payments and extended unemployment benefits affect TU. Using a simple model, we show that these estimates can be used to derive bounds on a monetary equivalent of the UI value and to derive the ratio of TU costs to utility gains from UI. Among claimants, we estimate that the median UI value is above 2.5 monthly wages but that the median TU cost represents more than half of the utility gains. For the non-claimants, our results point towards large costs of collecting benefits, 40% above the utility gains. Finally, we look at how the UI values and the claiming costs vary with observable characteristics.