Contenu du sommaire : Varia

In 2008-2009, a severe economic crisis struck the world economy. Many macro-economists assumed that the global financial crisis would change the prevalent way of economic thinking. This paper considers this idea and raises the question if a paradigm change in the German debate on macroeconomic policy has occurred. To this end, the paper analyzes and compares the macro-economic policy recommendations of the most important German macro-economic reports – Sachverständigenratsgutachten and Gemeinschaftsdiagnose – during the course of three economic slumps, including the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. The comparison shows that – notwithstanding that some minor changes in economic policy took place – there has been no paradigm change in the economic policy debates since the 2008-2009 world crisis. The absence of a significant change in the policy concepts raises the question of why there is such a high stability of the approaches of the two reports. It is suggested that the institutional context in which the expert discourse is embedded contributes to this stability.

Carbon Tax, Pensions and Public Deficits : The Hidden Cost of the Compartmentalization of Expertise This paper aims at raising attention to two intertwined issues. The first one concerns the consequences of the prevailing intellectual compartmentalization between questions related to energy and climate on the one hand, and to the viability of social security systems on the other (the viability of those systems is challenged by the increasing exposure to international competition and the ageing of the population). The second issue is about the fact that expertise on the funding of pensions are conducted under partial equilibrium analysis and ignore the general equilibrium effects of the various funding options on competitiveness, employment and wages. We take the methodological venture of building a general equilibrium vision of France for 2020 that is consistent with a scenario of the Conseil d'Orientation des Retraites. We first emphasize the limitations of policies that either i) use only one of the present instruments of the pension system (social contributions, retirement age), or ii) look for new resources by only considering an increase of income tax or VAT. Then we present a way to remove those limitations by introducing a carbon tax as a component of a policy package designed to absorb the deficits of the social accounts. We show that the current compartmentalization of expertise is dangerous, both for the funding of the pension system as well as for removing the obstacles to an ambitious climate policy.

Competition and market experiments : a settled debate ? A survey for a new research program This article presents a survey of the results obtained by the experiments carried on posted-offer markets. We propose an interpretation based on the existence or the nonexistence of a Nash equilibrium in the market structure used in the experiments. We show that the first experiments did not take into consideration this dimension. Therefore, their predictive power is greatly diminished. Subsequent experiments propose indeed a formal analysis of the existence of the Nash equilibrium. But the design protocols for these experiments lack uniformity. Thus, their results are hardly comparable. We conclude this article by preparing the ground for a future, uniform research.

Trade and Labour Market : A Literature Review This article reviews the recent literature on the impact of trade liberalization on the labor market. It addresses in a first step the 1990's studies in an attempt to understand the developments of the recent literature on this topic. Statistics suggest that employment structure in Europe and United-States tend to polarize into “good” and “bad” jobs. As in the 1990 debate, the two factors responsible for this job polarization are skill bias technical change (SBTC) and international trade. The job content of occupations becomes a central component of polarization analysis. Offshoring might have had an important impact especially if one analyzes all the channels through which it can affect labor market (change in the organizational structure, service offshoring, defensive innovation). This paper reviews the empirical and theoretical littérature on the effect of offshoring on the labor market but also tries to identify research needs and unexplored trails on this topic. The challenge for researchers today is to understand the channels through which offshoring acts on the labor market.

A new player on the french mobile phone market : a cost benefit analysis
The competition authority (ARCEP) authorized in 2011 the introduction of a fourth mobile operator (Free) alongside Orange, SFR and Bouygues. More competitors was expected to mean more competition, which was supposed to improve the efficiency of the sector. This choice was questioned by Deffains [2012] who showed that the introduction of Free would entail the destruction of 50.000 jobs. Conversely Thesmar and Landier [2012] expected from that measure the net creation of 16.000 to 30.000 jobs. These studies were focussed on the effect on employment. Here, we conduct a cost-benefit study that takes into account all the consequences of this measure to consumers, businesses and public finance. The arrival of Free has resulted in an annual increase of the consumer surplus of approximately € 1.2 billion. This gain is offset by a loss of a slightly higher amount for producers. But it is accompanied by a loss of about € 0.4 billion for public finance. In the end, the welfare impact of this decision is regrettable. The paper also discusses the reasons for which the benefits of competition were unlikely to materialize in the mobile phone sector.

This paper investigates whether chronic illnesses and injuries have a significant impact on individual performance in the labor market. We use the “Santé et Itinéraires Professionnels” (SIP, “Health and Labor Market Histories”) survey, conducted in France in the period 2006-2007. We evaluate the impact of chronic illnesses and accidents using propensity score matching. We find that chronic illness and injuries have negative effects on career outcomes and that women are more likely to claim minimum assistance revenue when such events occur. Moreover, while the initial health shock generally has long-lasting effects, it differs across genders and according to the nature of the health event: the results for men reveal a prevalence of short-run effects following accidents and a prevalence of long-run effects following chronic illnesses. We do not observe similar results for women: both chronic illnesses and accidents have long-run effects.