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Predictive AI and productivity growth dynamics: Evidence from French firms
No full textInternational audienceWhile artificial intelligence (AI) adoption holds the potential to enhance business operations through improved forecasting and automation, its relation with average productivity growth remain highly heterogeneous across firms. This paper shifts the focus and investigates the impact of predictive artificial intelligence (AI) on the volatility of firms’ productivity growth r ates. Using firm-level data from the 2019 French ICT survey, we provide robust evidence that AI use is associated with increased volatility. This relationship persists across multiple robustness checks, including analyses addressing causality concerns. To propose a possible mechanisms underlying this effect, we compare firms that purchase AI from external providers (“AI buyers”) and those that develop AI in-house (“AI developers”). Our results show that heightened volatility is concentrated among AI buyers, whereas firms that develop AI internally experience no such effect. Finally, we find that AI-induced volatility among “AI buyers” is mitigated in firms with a higher share of ICT engineers and technicians, suggesting that AI’s successful integration requires complementary human capital
Does Feasibility Explain the Unequal Development of Working From Home?
No full textInternational audienc
Take-up of Social Benefits: Experimental Evidence from France
No full textInternational audienceWe report on two nationwide experiments with job seekers in France. We first show that a meeting with social services to assess eligibility and help with applications to social benefits increased new benefit take-up by 29 percent. By contrast, an online simulator that gave personalized information on benefit eligibility did not increase take-up. Marginal treatment effects show that individuals who benefit the most from the meetings are the least likely to attend. Overall, without ruling out information frictions, our results suggest that transaction costs represent the main obstacle to applying for benefits or accessing government’s assistance in applying
Persistent inconsistencies in patient cost variability within the French DRG classification system over the 2012–2019 period
No full textInternational audienceThis paper evaluates the effectiveness of the 2009 French Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) classification reform, which introduced four severity levels within each DRG, ranging from low to very high, with corresponding increases in fixed-price reimbursements. Notably, the reform incorporates the Medicare Severity Diagnosis-Related Group (MS-DRG) system, first implemented in the United States in 2007, giving the French system international relevance. The French Public Health Insurance system (NHI) reimburses both public and private healthcare establishments through a DRG-based payment system. This study focuses on variations in hospital resource costs for four different health conditions. The paper begins by discussing the theoretical challenges of constructing DRG categories, particularly the trade-off between greater clinical detail (granularity) and the risk of distorting incentives for hospital efficiency. It then presents an empirical analysis of hospital resource cost variations both within and between DRGs for the same pathology or clinically meaningful group (DRG-root), using data from 2012 to 2019. Our findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to severity classification is inadequate. In some cases, broader categories improve statistical validity, while in others, more granular distinctions are necessary. We conclude that a tailored, case-by-case approach is the most effective solution. Specifically, the analysis reveals significant overlap in confidence intervals for hospital resource costs across DRG severity levels, suggesting that the current classification system fails to effectively capture cost differences related to severity. Additionally, a large portion of cost variation within DRGs is driven by factors unrelated to severity, such as hospital-specific characteristics. Overall, the results underscore the need to revise the current DRG system in France in order to reduce financial discrepancies and to prevent incentives for patient selection, especially before implementing bundled payment models that include both inpatient and outpatient care
Gender Identity, Norms, and Happiness
No full textHow do gender identity and norms relate to happiness? This paper takes advantage of the 2024 European Social Survey, which asks respondents to report their feelings of femininity and masculinity, and studies the relationships between these self-assessments, (non-)conformity to gender norms, and life satisfaction. The results show a robust asymmetry between men and women. For men, feeling more masculine, behaving in ways more typical of men, and life satisfaction are all positively cross-correlated. For women, while feeling more feminine and life satisfaction are similarly positively correlated, behaving in ways more typical of women is, in contrast, associated with lower life satisfaction. These patterns vary across European regions, potentially reflecting different histories. The results are robust to alternative measures of typical behavior of men and women and subjective well-being. The findings support theories of gender identity and reveal possible trade-offs implied by gender norms for women.</div
What do NEETs need ? The overall effect of active and passive labor market policies
No full textThe overall effect of active and passive labor market policies is pivotal to motivate programs combining the two components. This paper evaluates a flagship French program for disadvantaged youth Not in Employment Education or Training (NEETs) that combines a year of cash transfers and activation policies. The results show a positive total effect of the program on employment (+21 percentage points, +64% relative to control in LATE terms) emerging after program termination. The analysis of mechanisms suggests a negative effect of the cash transfer component on employment and lock-in from training, compensated by a positive effect of activation policies
Within-country inequality and the shaping of a just global climate policy
No full textInternational audienceClimate policy design must balance emissions mitigation with concerns for fairness, particularly as climate change disproportionately affects the poorest households within and across countries. Integrated Assessment Models used for global climate policy evaluation have so far typically not considered inequality effects within countries. To fill this gap, we develop a global Integrated Assessment Model representing national economies and subnational income, mitigation cost, and climate damage distribution and assess a range of climate policy schemes with varying levels of effort sharing across countries and households. The schemes are consistent with limiting temperature increases to 2 °C and account for the possibility to use carbon tax revenues to address distributional effects within and between countries. We find that carbon taxation with redistribution improves global welfare and reduces inequality, with the most substantial gains achieved under uniform taxation paired with global per capita transfers. A Loss and Damage mechanism offers significant welfare improvements in vulnerable countries while requiring only a modest share of global carbon revenues in the medium term. The poorest households within all countries may benefit from the transfer scheme, in particular when some redistribution is made at the country level. Our findings underscore the potential for climate policy to advance both environmental and social goals, provided revenue recycling mechanisms are effectively implemented. In particular, they demonstrate the feasibility of a welfare improving global climate policy involving limited international redistribution
Rethinking volatility scaling in firm growth
No full textWe revisit the size-volatility relationship in firm growth using administrative data on French manufacturing firms. Departing from the log-log linear decay commonly reported by other studies, we find a two-regime pattern: volatility declines steeply with size for small firms, but flattens for larger ones. We relate this new fact to the presence of resources misallocation as captured by imperfect correlation be- tween size and productivity at the firm level. To explain the nexus between these two facts, we develop a stochastic model where firms face a number of risky business opportunities for which they compete. Two key features characterize this competition process.First, larger firms are more intensively exposed to competition dynamics. Second, firms with higher productivity are more likely to see business opportunities turning into positive, rather than negative, growth episodes. We analytically show that only when the correlation between firm size and productivity is lower than 1 the model is able to reproduce the volatility scaling we observed in the data. Simulations suggest that finite sample approximations of our asymptotic result are satisfactory in a reasonable portion of the parameter space. We conclude showing that in France industries populated by firms with higher correlation between size and productivity are associated with steeper average size-volatility decays consistent with the model’s main prediction. Our findings suggest that the existence of resources misallocation, shaping the size-volatility relation, affects the relevance of the granularity channel in explaining aggregate fluctuations (Gabaix, 2011)
Memory and oblivion:how the past obliterated the 1929 crisis in France
No full textInternational audienceOral presentation duringe session "Financial Crises: Analyses, Perceptions, Memories in a Long-run Historical Perspective (Part 1/2)" (id 66211
Mitigation or adaptation to climate change? The role of fiscal policy
No full textInternational audienceThis article examines the interplay between fiscal policy and investments in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Adaptation is funded by public revenues from taxation and public bonds, whereas households can invest in mitigation and receive subsidies. We show that adaptation and mitigation are substitutes or complements, depending on the level of economic development and fiscal policy decisions. If the capital stock is initially low, adaptation and mitigation are complements (resp. substitutes) if the mitigation subsidy is low (resp. high). When the government is in debt, we show that increasing public spending to finance adaptation and/or mitigation could be beneficial if the capital stock is high enough but could be detrimental for countries with low capital stock. Thus, we add a new argument to the debate on the optimal mix between adaptation and mitigation, namely fiscal policy and the funding schemes of these investments. Finally, we propose extensions that consider a level of adaptation proportional to pollution flow, debt financing of public investment, and public mitigation investment alongside private adaptation investment