Research

Publications

Women are under-represented in politics. In this paper, we test one of the potential explanations for this situation: gender-bias from voters. We use a natural experiment during French local elections in 2015: for the first time in this country, candidates had to run by pairs, which had to be gender-balanced. We argue that this reform confused some voters, who might have assumed that the first name on the ballot represented the "main" candidate. Since the order of the candidates on the ballot was determined by alphabetical order, the order of appearance of male and female candidates is as-good-as-random, and this setting allows us to isolate gender biases from selection effects. Our main result is that there exists a negative gender bias affecting right-wing candidates, who receive about 1.5 points lower shares of vote when the female candidate appears first on the ballot. The missing votes pre- vented some pairs of candidates from being elected. Using the fact that the candidates can (but do not have to) report additional information about themselves on the ballot, we show that this discrimination is likely to be statistical, since the most affected women are those running in pairs which do not report any information.

We add to the literature on notable individuals (famous, prominent, distinguished) in collecting first a massive amount of data from various editions of Wikipedia and Wikidata along with deduplication techniques; and then using these partially overlapping sources to cross-verify each retrieved information. This strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.2 million individuals, including a third who are not present in the English edition of Wikipedia. An extension to 4.7 million entries is currently not recommended given the inaccuracy of the information and discrepancies between Wikidata and other sources. A non-negligible fraction of newly-added individuals were collected from non-English editions of Wikipedia. We adopt a social science approach: data collection is driven by specific social questions on gender, economic and cultural development and quantitative exploration of cultural trends, that we document in this paper.


Social Scientists and policy makers need precise data on market rents. Yet, while housing prices are systematically recorded, few accurate data sets on rents are available. In this paper, we present a new data set describing local rental markets in France based on online ads collected through to webscraping. Comparison with alternate sources reveals that online ads provide a non biased picture of rental markets and allow coverage of the whole territory. We then estimate hedonic models for prices and rents and document the spatial variations in rent-price ratios. We show that rents do not increase as much as prices in the tightest housing markets. We use our dataset to estimate the market rent of each transaction and of social dwellings. In the latter case, this allows us to estimate the in-kind benefit received by social tenants which is mainly driven by the level of private rent in their municipality.


The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented slowing of economic activity that followed caused severe disruptions to labor markets around the globe. In contrast to the United States, European Union countries funded short-time work programs to maintain jobs during a period of lockdown that was expected to be transitory. This succeeded in avoiding sharp increases in unemployment early in the recession. However, if the pandemic leads to a permanent reallocation of economic activity, short-time work programs may slow the process of workers moving from shrinking to growing sectors of the economy.


Manuscript under revision


We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the anticipated take- off of teleworking. We develop an indicator of the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We study how this indicator relates to prices and quantities in the corporate real estate market. We find that for offices in counties more exposed, the Covid-19 crisis has led to (1) higher vacancy rates, (2) less construction, (3) lower prices. Our findings reveal that teleworking has already an impact on the office market. Furthermore, forward-looking indicators suggest that market participants are anticipating a deeper shift to teleworking in the coming years.

Working papers

We document the dynamics of labor-changes in employment and hours worked -and of actual telework use during the pandemic. We find that employment losses are unrelated to telework use starting in 2020-Q4. This is in stark contrast with the onset of the pandemic that disproportionately affected skills, occupations and industries with low telework use. Our findings are the results of two phenomena. First, labor is dynamically heterogeneous: employment of skill and occupation groups that are most affected by the initial Covid-19 shock recover quickly, catching up with the rest of the economy by October 2020. Second, the use of telework has homogeneously declined within skills, occupations and industries -by 40 percent on average- leaving the relative ranking of telework use across groups unaltered. Finally, there is substantial and persistent cross-industry heterogeneity in labor market outcomes one year into the pandemic that is unrelated to the use of telework.

  • The Cost of agglomeration and the housing supply elasticity with Guillaume Chapelle

Estimating the housing supply elasticity has been a constant concern for macroeconomists and urban economists. However, both streams of contributions are rather poorly connected. In this paper we try to bridge this gap with two main contributions. First we introduce the concepts of intensive and extensive supply elasticities. We argue that macroeconomists are concerned with the intensive supply elasticity where the amount of land developed is constant as in their framework urban growth is absent. This elasticity documents the impact of short run variations in the price of new dwellings on housing starts. On the other hand, urban economists are considering the extensive margin supply elasticity where housing price is the consequence of long run urban growth and is considered as a cost. This elasticity document the way housing price reacts when the city size(the total number of dwellings or the city population) is growing. Second, using a new dataset distinguishing old and new housing prices and two original identification strategies to deal with the simultaneity bias and the endogeneity of regulation we estimate and decompose both elasticities for the main French urban areas. We show that both elasticities are not equivalent and do not have the same drivers. French urban areas face higher agglomeration costs than their US counterparts because of regulation.

Other publications