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Hypergamy and singlehood by social position in France since 1969Couples in which the woman is more educated than her partner are now the majority in France: female hypergamy has been reversed. This article updates this result based on Labor Force Survey data, and shows a similar though less marked trend regarding occupational status: the proportion of women belonging to a social class (EGP schema) higher than their partner's has increased from 13% in 1969 to 23% in 2016. No hypergamy is observed in terms of the social class of origin. We confirm the classical theory relating hypergamy to a gender-asymmetric distribution of singlehood. Although singlehood used to be more frequent among women with a higher status, this situation has disappeared or even reversed over time. The distribution of singles among women has become closer to that among men.JEL: D19 ; J12 ; J16 ; J21 ; I21

Missing deflation
Was the way inflation unfolded after the 2007-2009 crisis atypical? According to Paul Krugman: "If inflation [note: in the United States] had responded to the Great Recession and aftermath in the same way it did in previous big slumps, we would be deep in deflation by now; we aren't.” Indeed, after 2009, inflation in the United States remained surprisingly stable given actual economic developments. Has this phenomenon, which has been described as "missing deflation", been observed in the euro zone?Despite the deepest recession since the 1929 crisis, the inflation rate remained stable at around 1.5% on average between 2008 and 2011 in the United States, and 1% in the euro zone. Does this mean that the Phillips curve, which links inflation to real activity, has lost its empirical validity? In a note in 2016, Olivier Blanchard recalls on the contrary that the Phillips curve, in its simplest original version, remains a valid instrument for understanding the links between inflation and unemployment, despite this "missing disinflation". Blanchard notes, however, that the link between the two variables has weakened, because inflation is increasingly dependent on expectations of inflation, which are themselves anchored in the US Federal Reserve's inflation target. In their 2015 article, Coibion and Gorodnichenko explain the missing deflation in the United States by the fact that inflation expectations tend to be influenced by the most visible price changes, such as changes in the price of a barrel of oil. Since 2015, we have seen a drop in inflation expectations concomitant with the decline in oil prices.The difficulty in accounting for recent changes in inflation by using the Phillips curve led us in this article to evaluate its potential determinants and to consider whether the euro zone has also experienced a phenomenon of "missing deflation". Based on a standard Phillips curve, we did not find the conclusions of Coibion and Gorodnichenko when we consider the euro zone as a whole. In other words, real activity and inflation expectations give a good description of the way inflation is behaving.This result seems to come, however, from a bias in aggregation between national inflation behaviours in the euro zone. In particular, we find a notable divergence between the countries of northern Europe (Germany, France), which show a general tendency towards missing inflation, and the more peripheral countries (Spain, Italy, Greece), which are exhibiting periods of missing deflation. This divergence nevertheless shows up from the beginning of our sample, that is to say, in the first years when the euro zone was created, and seems to be absorbed from 2006, without undergoing any notable change during the 2008-2009 crisis.In contrast to what happened in the United States, it seems that the euro zone did not experience missing deflation as a result of the 2008-2009 economic and financial crisis. On the contrary, it seems that divergences in inflation in Europe predate the crisis and tended to be absorbed by the crisis.JEL: D84, E24, E32, E52, E58.

This paper investigates how changes in the macro-financial environment impact the way in which capital market prices react to dividend announcements. Using a sample of 841 dividend announcements by French companies belonging to the SBF 120 index, we examined the role of changes in the ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) level around the announcement date (implied volatility – VCAC – is used as an empirical proxy for ambiguity) on the response of investors to a release of dividend information. Based on a global sample and applying interaction methodology, we found that, consistent with ambiguity theory, an increase in VCAC leads investors to place more weight on news of bad dividends than on news of good dividends. When the sample is split, depending on the VCAC sign, results are more complex. We actually obtained an important asymmetric impact between good and bad news for the larger window [-15; +15] but not for the smaller one [-1; +1]. Nevertheless, in this latter case, we observed that, consistent with the ambiguity explanation, the reaction to good (bad) news decreases (increases) dramatically when ambiguity increases, compared to when ambiguity decreases.JEL code: G14, G35.

The paths to research in cliometrics opened by Capital in the 21st Century
The publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century has revived interest in the issue of inequality in history. This book contains two key proposals: the author establishes a first principle of fundamental differences between the return on capital and wages, which would be the source of inequality in history. At the same time, the accumulation of capital is the factor that has historically driven economic growth. Piketty's book explores these two aspects in succession, but he does not study the links between these two propositions: are inequalities a motor or a brake on economic growth in history? This is the thread of our analysis of the book, which examines two majorquestions: how to move from the statement of a “historical law of capitalism” into a dynamic growth model? And, can savings be an obstacle to economic growth? In a final section, we suggest that the use of cliometrics can be a means of clarifying if not deciding these debates.JEL Classification: B4, E10, E11, E22, E23, E24, E61, E62, E64, N10, O4, O5, P1.

Unemployment rate convergence and the persistence of gender inequalities
This article analyses the “continuum” of labour market situations of women and men in France in 2016. Several situations are distinguished: full-time employment; part-time employment with short or long hours; unemployment (ILO definition);the potential additional labour force (using INSEE's definition of the “unemployment halo”, which is broader than Eurostat's definition); and inactivity. Women's and men's situations are analysed and compared according to educational level and the presence of young children. It appears that very different continua can lead to similar unemployment rates for men and women, questioning the relevance of this indicator, which is the one mostly used in public debate. Using a multinomial logit model, an econometric analysis confirms that women are always more likely to be in any situation but full-time employment and that they are in particular more likely to be in less visible situations such as inactivity or the potential additional labour force. Finally, we show how the crossed effects of educational level and the presence of young children can explain the relative homogeneity of men's situations compared to the very high diversity of women's situations on the labour market.JEL codes: J16, J21, B54