The effect of import competition across occupations Journal of International Economics (2024) with Sergi Basco, Maxime Liegey & Marti Mestieri
The Impact of Foreign Competition along the Quality Ladder Economic Journal (2023) with Paul Piveteau
The Dominance of Skill in Online Poker International Review of Law and Economics (2023) with Jérôme Hergueux
Heterogeneous Policy Distortions and the Labor Share Review of Economic Dynamics (2020)
Estimating Firm Product Quality Using Tade Data Journal of International Economics (2019) with Paul Piveteau
Gravity beyond CES: Implications for Substitution Patterns and Welfare with Paul Piveteau
Gravity models of international trade often rely on preferences with constant elasticity of substitution (CES) across varieties. This assumption rules out any role for product differentiation in export performance and imposes homogenous effects of competition across countries. In this paper, we augment standard gravity equations with structural controls for an exporting country’s isolation in the product space. The augmented equation can be estimated easily by 2SLS. We show that our correction improves the predictions of gravity models by capturing stronger substitutions between similar exporters.
Positive Vibration? The Impact of Leadership Style on Team Activity and Success with Jérôme Hergueux. Available upon request!
We analyze a field dataset of 9,805 software projects over 87 months to study the impact of leadership style on team performance. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that inspirational communication alone has minimal impact on team dynamics. By contrast, a lead-by-example strategy causes a significant increase in team activity, growth, and success. Notably, combining both strategies yields the best collective outcomes (a 15.7% increase in project success). These findings can be directly derived from a simple extension of existing theory. Effective leaders need to inspire followers, but their ability to do so crucially rests on their capacity to lead by example.
Offshoring Wage Inequality in Tax Havens - joint with Margarita Lopez Forero (Banque de France) and Kevin Parra-Ramirez (Banque de France) . Available upon request!
We use matched employer-employee data on the universe of French firms to study the role of multinational enterprises' (MNEs) presence in tax havens in determining within-firm wage inequalities. We implement a difference-in-differences to analyze the effect of firm entry in tax havens on firms' wage variance. We find that the average firm wage variance experiences a drop by 4.7% over the immediate years following the establishment in a tax haven. We argue that wage inequality of MNEs with presence in tax havens is underestimated, due to the "salary split" for the highest wages of the firm. Indeed, we find that top 1% wages of the firm decline on average by 3.1% after the tax haven entry. On top of this, when we decompose the effects on the top 1%, we find a stronger wage decline due to the tax haven entry for the top salaries, as follows: a 4.4% decline for the top 0.5% and 4.8% for the 0.1% of top wages. The drop in wage variance is explained by a decline in wages at the top of the distribution and not by an effect on the rest of wages, on which there is no statistically significant effect. A panel event-study design shows that our estimates capture the tax haven entry effect and not differential trends between treated and control units. Finally, we show that these developments are exclusively related to tax haven foreign investment and not to other foreign investments.