Work in Progress

Physicians at work: The effect of pediatricians' labour supply on general practitioner's volume of services (joint with Maripier Isabelle and Guy Lacroix)

This paper investigates whether variations in the volume of services provided by pediatricians spill over on the volume of services provided by general practitioners in the context of a health system with universal coverage. To address reverse causality issues, as generalists' services can influence pediatricians' services through referrals, we exploit the introduction of a mixed remuneration scheme for some pediatricians in 1999 in Quebec to instrument the variations in their labour supply. We then leverage the share of pediatricians under mixed remuneration in each generalist’s surroundings as an instrument to estimate the impact of a variation in the volume of services provided by these pediatricians on the generalist’s supply of services. Our first results suggest that when the volume of services provided by each pediatrician decreases by 100, the volume of services to children below 13 years old provided by a generalist around increases by 11. Some evidence suggests substitution between generalists’ and specialists’ services when looking at regional volumes of services. 

Presentations: Irdes-Liraes Workshop 2026 (Paris)*, CEA 2024 (Toronto, Canada), CHESG 2024 (Toronto, Canada), SCSE 2024 (Montreal, Canada), Economics PhD seminar U. Laval 2022 (Quebec city, Canada)

Federal government job cuts and job transition, comparison between same-sex couple and different-sex couple individuals

Leveraging detailed Canadian survey data (Labor Force Survey), this article is the first to provide descriptive evidence about the effect of the 2012 budget cut in federal jobs in Canada on job transition of the federal workers and their wage evolution, differentiating same-sex and different-sex couples. More precisely, restricting the sample to respondents who are or were in couples (married or common law), the result suggests that individuals in same-sex couples are more likely to leave the federal sector in 2012 and be unemployed (non-significant results though). In terms of wages, non-significant evidence suggests that individuals in same-sex couples earn a premium in the federal sector, which they lose after leaving this sector. However, individuals in same-sex couples are 23\% less likely to join the private sector after leaving the federal sector (significant result). The sign of this last result holds when considering all employees of the public sector. The reverse is true when considering all the job leavers from the private sector: individuals in same-sex couples are more likely to join the public sector compared to individuals in different-sex couples. This last result, suggesting that the public sector could be more attractive for job leavers in same-sex couples, contributes to the literature on the transitions between the public and private sectors.

Presentations: CSQIEP virtual seminar 2025, CEA 2025 (Montréal, Canada), Economics PhD seminar U. Laval 2025, ACEA 2024 (Halifax, Canada), CSQIEP Mentoring Conference 2024 (San Diego, USA)

Adhesion to public health recommendations, the case of COVID-19 vaccination

This chapter proposes a novel setting of opinions dynamics with individuals exchanging with peers about a public policy. I propose a confirmation bias structure which retains individuals at their opinion correlating with the ideological distance between their opinion and the public policy. Using a naive-learning baseline model, I therefore introduce a signal (e.g. a far-reaching public policy) fixed over time and evaluate the speed of convergence of individuals' opinions toward this signal, comparing two different updating rules. Applying the model to a stylized case of COVID-19 vaccination decision, I found that the updating rule which is most sensitive to individual's ideological distance to vaccination recommendation describes better the behavior of the most "resistant" individuals to vaccination.  

Presentation: Economics PhD seminar U. Laval 2025

*: scheduled