Research can be seen as a journey, mine is at its early beginning. The goal I pursue is to better understand capital formation and especially in the energy market, regarding the challenge of energy transition. It is fascinating topic from the point of view of technology, with this question: what will be the main energy in the future? There are so much things happening, from the Dutch Wind Wheel in Rotterdam to the experimentation of geoengineering technologies, that we have to be aware and to bring new persectives everyday.
Academic Publications
Projeter le nombre futur de dépendants : une approche multifactorielle avec un modèle Probit, Revue d'Economie Financière n°152 (Forthcoming)
Comment repousser l’âge moyen d’entrée en dépendance ? (with Mathieu Nogues), Revue d'Economie Financière n°152 (Forthcoming)
Working papers
Knowledge-based strucutural change (with Christian Ghiglino, Kazuo Nishimura and Alain Venditti), R&R at Economic Theory.
(Previously named: Non-balanced endogenous growth and structural change: when Lucas meets Kaldor and Kuznets)
Abstract: How will structural change unfold beyond the rise of services? Motivated by the observed dynamics within the service sector we propose a model of structural change in which productivity is endogenous and output is produced with two intermediate substitutable capital goods. In the progressive sector the accumulation of knowledge leads to an unbounded increase in TFP, as sector becoming asymptotically dominant. We are then able to recover the increasing shares of workers, the increasing real and nominal shares of the output observed in progressive service and IT sectors in the US. Interestingly, the economy follows a growth path converging to a particular level of wealth that depends on the initial price of capital and knowledge. As a consequence, countries with the same fundamentals but lower initial wealth will be characterized by lower asymptotic wealth.
Keywords: Two-sector model, non-balanced endogenous growth, structural change, labor augmenting technical change
JEL Numbers: C62, O41.
The energy transition and fossil energy use (JMP)
Abstract: Achieving the energy transition is among global priorities of the 21st century, one key element to success being the development of affordable renewable technology to compete with fossil energy. While technological progress seems already biased in favor of the renewable sector since the 70's, we had to wait until 2005 to observe a sharp increase of its share in the energy mix. In this paper I develop a theoretical model of energy transition able to explain this delay through a lasting capital effect in favor of fossil energy. The existence of a trade-off between efficient pollutant capital and less efficient carbon-free alternative, in a context of embodied technical change and long living power plants, slows down the capacity to close polluting units. This mechanism postpones the effect of biased technical change.
Keywords: Energy transition, investment specific, exogenous growth, climate economics
JEL Numbers: C61, O41, Q43
How does biased technological change affects energy production in the US? Evidence from patent data, under review.
Abstract: Empirical literature about the energy transition has focused on the impact of energy prices or energy policy on the rate of technological change, see Popp et al. (2010) and Popp (2019). However, very few papers have attempt toestimate the impact of technological progress on energy production decisions.I am trying to fill this gap using an AutoRegressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) model on yearly US data to estimate the so-called “directed technical change” (DTC) effect from Acemoglu et al. (2012). The main novelty of this paper is to provide a measure of biased technological progress based on patents citations from the EPO/OECD PATSTATS database as a way to account for research value. Other control variables are added to the analysis such as energy prices, real domestic investment and energy exports. The empirical analysis validate the DTC mechanism for different definition of technological progress and for different time period, with a short run coefficient lying between 0.07 and 0.15 and a long-run coefficient between 0.12 and 0.36. I also exhibit that for energy prices, the negative substitution effect can sometimes be out performed by the positive “resource envelop” effect.
Keywords: Energy transition, ARDL, macroeconometrics
Work in progress
Is Intangible capital a matter of education? (with Lloyd-Braga T. and L. Modesto)