Publication

"Judge Bias in Labor Courts and Firm Performance ", September 2023, Journal of the European Economic Association

with Pierre Cahuc (Sciences Po), Stéphane Carcillo (OECD) and Flavien Moreau (IMF)

Abstract: Does judge subjectivity influence firms performance? We study the economic consequences of judge decisions by collecting information on more than 145,000 Appeal court rulings, combined with administrative firm-level records covering the whole universe of French firms. The quasi-random assignment of judges to cases reveals that judge bias, defined as judge-specific differences on granting compensation, has statistically significant effects on the survival, employment, and sales of small firms, especially among very small and low-performing ones. When compensation for wrongful dismissal is instrumented by judge bias, an increase in compensation of 1 percent of the payroll reduces employment by 3 percent after 3 years for those firms.

"Customer capital spillovers: Evidence from sales managers in international markets", AEJ:Applied - forthcoming

with Clémence Lenoir (INSEE)

Abstract: Expanding their customer base is crucial for firms to grow. This paper leverages workers’ job- to-job transitions to better understand how buyer-seller relationships form. We focus on one type of worker likely to build ties with buyers - sales managers - and one type of buyer - foreign partners. Combining unique French firm-to-firm trade data with matched employer-employee data, we carry out an event-study analysis that exploits the timing of sales managers’ transitions from one firm to another for identification. We find that recruiting a sales manager increases by 32% the probability to export to the buyers of her former firm. The expansion of the firm’s customer base comes at the expense of the buyer’s former suppliers, most notably the former employer. Yet, business stealing is only partial, and thus job-to-job transitions are not zero-sum. Last, we provide evidence that sales managers’ transitions re-allocate buyers toward small and young suppliers, and that the newly-created matches last longer than the buyer’s former matches.

Working papers

"Revisiting the effects of search frictions on the firm size distribution", March 2023

with Jules Depersin (UvA)

Abstract: Search frictions can impede the formation of optimal matches between consumer and supplier, or employee and employer, and lead to inefficiencies. This paper revisits the effect of search frictions on the firm size distribution when challenging two common but strong assumptions: that all agents share the same ranking of firms, and that agents meet all firms, whether small or large, at the same rate. We build a random search model in which we relax those two assumptions and show that the intensity of search frictions has a non-monotonic effect on market concentration. An increase in friction intensity increases market concentration up to a certain threshold of frictions, that depends on the slope of the meeting rate with respect to firm’s size. We leverage unique French customs data to estimate this slope. First, we find that in a range of plausible scenarios, search frictions intensity increases market concentration. Second,  we show that slopes have increased over time, which unambiguously increases market concentration in our model. Overall, we shed light on the importance of the structure of frictions, rather than their intensity to understand market concentration.

Selected work in progress

"Large firm's collusion in the labor market: Evidence from collective barganing", New version soon, with Antoine Valtat

Policy work

Evaluation de l’impact du barème d’indemnisation du salarié licencié sans cause réelle et sérieuse, with Pierre Cahuc, Stéphane Carcillo, Pauline Carry, Flavien Moreau