Winner of CESifo Distinguished Award in Public Economics 2026
Abstract: This paper develops a comprehensive framework for evaluating the welfare effects of increasing the generosity of social assistance for young adults. Using bank transaction data from a large French bank, together with an original survey of redistributive preferences, I establish three facts. First, young adults consume more than a quarter less than older individuals and have a marginal propensity to consume that is nearly twice as high, indicating a substantially higher marginal utility of consumption. Second, by tracking private intra-family transfers transaction by transaction, I find that parents offset only about one eight of any public transfer received by their child, implying that public support largely accrues to young adults. Third, survey respondents assign higher Pareto weights to young adults. Taken together, these findings imply that one additional euro of social assistance generates about twice as much social marginal utility when allocated to a young adult rather than to an older individual. This conclusion is robust across three independent approaches based on consumption levels, marginal propensities to consume, and survey-elicited preferences. Transfers to young adults also partly finance themselves by increasing educational attainment, making them at least 15 per cent less costly to the government than transfers to older individuals. Combining benefits and costs, I estimate that an additional euro transferred to a young adult generates two to two and a half times the social welfare of the same euro transferred to an older individual.
How do migrants and natives search for jobs? with Lena Hensvik, Thomas Le Barbanchon and Roland Rathelot
Abstract: In this paper, we explore job-search-related sources of the migrant-native earnings gap and unemployment duration gap. Using a sample of over 400,000 jobseekers from the largest online platform in Sweden, we find that migrants from developing countries send more applications and apply to jobs that pay 6.7\% less (3.4\% less when controlling for observable characteristics). This behaviour could stem from migrants expecting a higher penalty in the success of their applications for higher-paying jobs, or from information frictions. Leveraging data on hires that we can match to applications at the worker-employer level, we show that the probability of being hired is indeed lower for migrants than for natives, but that the gap is not larger for higher-paying jobs, suggesting the relevance of information imperfections. To test this hypothesis, we take advantage of a randomised experiment that nudged jobseekers to apply to randomly different sets of jobs. We find that migrants nudged to apply to higher-paying jobs experience higher (rather than lower) probabilities of being hired, which supports the hypothesis of undershooting due to information frictions.
Maternal Childcare Preferences and Labor Supply of Mothers with Léa Dubreuil (slides available upon request)
Abstract: This paper investigates the respective roles of labor market constraints, childcare constraints, and maternal preferences in driving both the post-childbirth drop in mothers’ working hours and their limited responsiveness to family policies. We develop a labor supply model that incorporates preferences for maternal care and conduct a survey of 1,400 highly educated women. We find that a substantial share of the post-birth decline in hours worked reflects unconstrained choices, suggesting that the reduction in hours for this group is unlikely to be dropped by policies that solely target constraints. We show that while both labor market and childcare constraints shape mothers’ working hours, their effects are heterogeneous and, on average, offsetting, as constraints lead some women to work less than they would like, but others to work more. Consistent with the literature, we find that childcare subsidies have no net effect on hours worked, as heterogeneous constraint effects lead to varied positive and negative responses to the policy, which cancel each other out. Yet, these policies do effectively relax childcare constraints, thereby aligning actual drop in labor supply more closely with mothers’ preferences. Finally, we examine the role of social norms and beliefs and find that perceived returns to maternal care on child well-being significantly influence mothers’ preferences to stay at home.