Supérieure’s scientific contributions

This paper analyses the effects of money shocks on macroeconomic aggregates in a flexible-price, incomplete-markets environment that generates persistent wealth inequalities amongst agents. In this framework, unexpected money shocks redistribute wealth from the cash-rich employed to the cash-poor unemployed, and induce the former to increase their labour supply in order to maintain their desired levels of consumption and precautionary savings. The reduced-form dynamics of the model is a textbook "output-inflation tradeoff" equation whereby inflation shocks raise current output. The attenuating role of mean inflation and money growth persistence on this non-neutrality tradeoff, as well as some of the welfare implications of wealth redistribution, are also examined.

Using a recent household survey conducted in Senegal, I examine the impact of negative and positive income shocks on departures from and entries in the household. I focus on differences in responses to shocks across the urban and rural sectors as well as age and gender groups. Striking differences emerge. Positive shocks increase entries of young girls and adult females in rural areas while they attract adult males in urban areas. Negative shocks decrease the arrivals of boys in urban areas while, in rural areas, they only impact the entries of adult males. Migration only increases after negative shocks, for prime-age adults wherever they reside and for adult children of urban household heads. In addition to migration, I examine private transfers. They show much less contrast between urban and rural areas but a sharp contrast between males and females. Adult males increase the amount of transfers they send after positive shocks and receive more transfers after negative shocks, wherever they reside, pointing towards the use of transfers as insurance. Females send and receive on average more transfers than males. However, negative shocks do not increase the amount of transfers they receive. Negative shocks only reduce transfers given by older rural females. Overall, both in terms of movements and transfers, individuals benefit very differently from their external relations, depending on their place of residence, gender and age. Given the heterogenous responses of migration and private transfers to income shocks, identical public policies may have very different effects for urban and rural areas and across age and gender.

Argentina is a unique experience of protracted economic instability and monetary disorder. In the framework of a long-term view, we investigate the demand for narrow money in Argentina from 1900 to 2006, shedding some light on the existence of money demand equilibria in extremely turbulent economies. The paper examines the effect of monetary regime changes by dealing with the presence of structural breaks in long-run equations. We estimate and test for regime changes through a sequential approach and we embed breaks in long-run models. A robust cointegration analysis can be hence performed in a single-equation framework. We find that estimated parameters are in sharp contrast with those reported in the literature for Argentina, but in line with those reported for industrialized countries, while significant structural breaks appear consistent with major policy shocks that took place in Argentina during the 20th century.

This paper is dedicated to the relation between market development and democracy. We distinguish contexts and preferences and ask whether it is true that the demand for democracy only emerges after a certain degree of market development is reached, and whether, conversely, democratization is likely to be an obstacle to the acceptation of market liberalization. Our study hinges on a new survey rich in attitudinal variables: the Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 2006 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank, in 28 post-Transition countries. Our identification strategy consists in relying on the specific situation of frontier-zones. We find that democracy enhances the support for market development whereas the reverse is not true. Hence, the relativist argument according to which the preference for democracy is an endogenous by-product of market development is not supported by our data.

This paper investigates the relationships between new technologies, innovative workplace practices and the age structure of the workforce in a sample of French manufacturing firms. We find evidence that the wage-bill share of older workers is lower in innovative firms and that the opposite holds for younger workers. This age bias affects both men and women. It is also evidenced within occupational groups, thus suggesting that skills do not completely protect workers against the labour-market consequences of ageing. More detailed analysis of employment inflows and outflows shows that new technologies essentially affect older workers through reduced hiring opportunities as compared to younger workers. In contrast, organisational innovations mainly affect the probability of exit, which decreases much more for younger than for older workers following reorganisation.