Research

Automation may destroy jobs and change the labour demand structure, thereby potentially impacting workers’ mental health. Implementing propensity score matching on French individual survey data, we find that working in an automatable job is associated with a 3 pp increase in the probability of suffering from mental disorders. Fear of automation through fear of job loss, expectation of a required change in skills, and fear of unwanted job mobility seem to be relevant channels to explain the findings.

Attitudes towards homosexuality vary greatly from country to country but also within countries, as exhibited by the concomitant rise in gay-friendly protests and homophobic hate crimes in some countries. This paper evaluates the extent to which same-sex marriage (SSM) laws, approved in several EU countries over the past two decades, have contributed to favor gay-friendly opinions among people depending on their social interactions. We propose a simplified dyadic model in which individuals learn about the social norm conveyed by a law through strong ties (family or close friends) and weak ties (outside the family and close friends). We show that the relative importance of these different social ties in shaping individuals' opinions depends on the alignment between the law and the local social norm. Using the 2002-2016 European Social Surveys, we test the theoretical predictions with a pseudo-panel dynamic difference-in-difference setting relying on the progressive adoption of SSM laws in European countries. We show that strong ties induce a lower increase in gay-friendly opinions than do weak ties following the adoption of SSM law, when the law is aligned with the local social norm. Results are reversed when the law clashes with the local social norm.

This paper evaluates the effect on mental health of consecutive terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016. We compile information about the three main terrorist attacks that struck France over this period and assess whether the potential effect on mental health (i.e., depression) of a terrorist attack is smoothed once people consider terrorist attacks as “the new normality.” We exploit data from the French Constances epidemiological survey and combine an event study strategy with a difference-in-difference approach to compare before-after changes in mental health the year of the attack with the same changes the year before. We show that the negative effect of a terrorist attack on mental health decreases over time from one attack to another, and disappears completely for the last attack. Socio-demographic composition of the sample, geographical or socio-demographic proximity to the victims or media exposure do not arise as factors responsible for this changing effect of terrorist attacks on mental health.

Unemployment and mental health in France. We use the French survey Santé et itinéraire professionnel to evaluate the causal effect of unemployment on mental healh in France. We investigate whether the occurence and duration increase psycological disorders (major depression spell and generalize anxiety). We use health history since childhood and instrumental variable methodes to deal with unobserved heterogeneity and endogenous relation between health and unemployment. Results indicate that unemployment negatively affect the mental health of men but not women.

The Reforms of the French Public Employment Service : a Critical Review. The French public employment service has experienced major reforms since 2008. Still, the recent period showed the need to deepen the thoughts about how to pursue stronger efforts. We rely here on past experiences in France and in other countries and on the results of evaluation studies to propose areas for discussion. We address the issues of the unemployment insurance financing and job search assistance. We show the need to strenghten job search assistance and rethink how it is provided.

In this paper we investigate how active labor market policy programs affect firms' hiring strategies and, eventually, firms' performance. We focus on counseling and monitoring which may reduce search costs for employers, but which may also have ambiguous effect on the employer–employee matching quality and thus on firms' performance. Using a large scale experiment which was conducted in Denmark in 2005–2006 and induced a greater provision of activation, we find that small firms hiring in the districts where the social experiment was conducted changed their hiring practices in favor of unemployed workers and experienced greater turnover than other firms. Treated firms also experienced no change or a marginal reduction in value added and total factor productivity during the first years after the experiment. These results are consistent with the idea that monitoring creates compulsion effects which counteract the possible improvement in the matching process expected from job search assistance.

Analyzing the Non-Use of Unemployment Insurance. This paper provides a theoretical model for explaining the empirical evidence of unemployment insurance non take-up. Our framework is focused on four determinants of take-up: the monetary incentives, the imperfect information about the eligibility rules, the administrative difficulties to make a claim and the non-monetary incentives such as the effectiveness of the unemployment agency as a search method. Our model accounts for the dynamics of take-up and the endogenous link between job search and benefit claiming. We show that the existence of non take-up may affect the evaluation of unemployment insurance systems.