Ongoing ANR Projects
Prosocial Behaviour: A Tale of Two Images (SOSELF)
ANR Grant awarded in 2022 for 48 months.
Coordinator: Emeric HENRY (with Roberto GALBIATI)
Objective
Prosocial behaviour is driven, not only by formal incentives, but also by image concerns, both self- and social image. While there is a growing literature on the consequences of image concerns on ethical behavior, the interactions between self-and social-image have not been studied yet. In SOSELF, we propose a comprehensive approach to fill this gap.
Our project will use a combination of theory, laboratory experiments and empirical methods relying on an interdisciplinary team. We will explore how social and self-image are tied together by a principle of coherence and how their interactions drive behavioural responses to the environment. Building on these results, we will study the optimal design of one of the main interventions used to promote prosocial behavior: moral reminders.
SOSELF can inform policy in a wide range of domains and we will focus specifically on how behavioural interventions can decrease the circulation of fake news or can change company culture.
More about Emeric HENRY and his research
More about Roberto GALBIATI and his research
Read more about the SOSELF project on the ANR's website
Job Complementarities in Employment: Consequences for Minorities (JOCE)
ANR Grant awarded in 2018 for 48 months + 6-month "COVID" extension (transferred to Sciences Po in 2021)
Partner: Pierre-Philippe COMBES
Objective
The aim of this project is to consider the impact of job complementarities in employment on segregation, inequality, and social mobility. The degree of complementarity between different categories of workers is a key dimension determining labour market outcomes. Moreover, these complementarities evolve over time. In a predominantly manufacturing economy, the key question was the interaction between capital and labour, but the move to a service economy has changed this and over the past 40 years a growing complementarity across different groups of workers has appeared. It is hence important to understand who works with whom (at the level of the firm, the city, the region or the household) if we want to explain the labour market performance of different groups, notably of minorities.
Complementarities can arise at many levels, but we intend to focus on three features.
- The first concerns different skill groups. Complementarities may exist at the level of the firm since low‐skill workers provide business services that increase the productivity of the skilled, or of the city as the leisure/personal service sector is low‐skill intensive and hence these workers provide the amenities that attract the most productive individuals to urban centres.
- A second dimension of complementarity relates to the geographical origin of individuals. The small effect of immigration on local wages found in empirical studies can best be explained by the fact that the type of skills supplied by immigrants is a complement to the native skills (Peri, 2016), yet this hypothesis has not been fully tested on the data, particularly for middle‐income countries.
- Lastly, it is also possible to think of complementarities arising at the level of the household. On the one hand, domestic services are also provided by those at the bottom of the skill distribution, raising the question of whether the expansion of this sector has been a factor in the increase in high‐skilled female labour force participation. On the other, spouses in a household complement each other in the production of the household good, and this has implications for the involvement of each of them in the labour market.
Our project will consider these different sources of complementarities to deepen our understanding of how they shape earnings dispersion across different groups and will hence contribute to explaining the causes and consequences of inequality.
More about Pierre-Philippe COMBES and his research
Read more about the JOCE project on the ANR's website
individual risks and the macroeconomy (irmac)
ANR Grant awarded in 2020 for a duration of 48 months
Partner : Xavier RAGOT
Objective
Labor income risks, namely unemployent risk and wage risk, are a major concern for many workers, essentially because they are imperfectly insured (that is, insurance markets against idiosyncratic labor-income shocks are “incomplete”). As a result, those risks generate significant ex post inequalities across agents as well as an inefficient precautionary motive for saving, whose instability over the business cycle may greatly amplify economic crises. This source of inequality and aggregate instability is a recurrent phenomenon, and one that is dramatically illustrated by the ongoing worldwide economic collapse. The purpose of the project is to:
- quantify how aggregate shocks are amplified under incomplete markets;
- clarify the transmission channels of alternative economic policies in these circumstances; and
- design macroeconomic policies (monetary policy, fiscal policy, labor-market policies etc.) capable of optimally stabilizing economic crises in the presence of uninsured labor-income risk.
The project will be composed of two main parts: one that will focus on understanding the transmission mechanisms of aggregate shocks and policies under incomplete markets; and another part that will analyze the optimality of macroeconomic policies (i.e., monetary, fiscal, tax, labormarket policies) in response to aggregate shocks. The focus will be on the way different types of aggregate shocks alter the amount of idiosyncratic risk and rising inequality faced by the households. Given these propagation mechanisms, we will investigate the transmission and the optimality of alternative macro and insurance policies following sharp and brutal declines in economic activity, such as those triggered worldwide by the 2008 financial crisis or the current Covid-19 crisis. Both aspects of the study –the positive one and the normative one–, which will require the development of new models and methods, will be divided into several subprojects involving members of the research team and possibly outside co-authors.
To sum up, the purpose of the overall project is to revisit the transmission channel and optimality of a variety of policy instruments, under the assumption that individual risks are uninsured and households are heterogeneous. These policy tools include:
- conventional monetary policy (i.e., changes in nominal interest rates by the central bank);
- unconventional monetary policy (i.e., forward guidance about future policy rates; large-scale asset purchases; money-financed fiscal stimulus; etc.);
- transitory expansions in government spending or reductions in taxes;
- public debt policies (i.e., optimal public debt in the presence of liquidity demand);
- changes in the level, cyclicality and duration of unemployment benefit payments and short-time work arrangements;
- changes in the level, cyclicality and persistence of tariffs on traded goods.
This is a thriving area of macroeconomics in which several teams are currently competing worldwide. We aim at being one of these teams and would like to rely on the support of ANR to achieve this. We stress that we will pay special attention to the euro area, which is currently facing a number of macroeconomic policy challenges. Indeed, in the euro area monetary policy is centralized but constrained (by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates), why fiscal policy is decentralized and, overall, non-cooperative. Unemployment insurance is also decentralized, hence with no crosscountry risk sharing. Our project will thus help better understand how monetary and fiscal policies should be designed in a context where the institutional features of the euro area may aggravate the lack of insurance across households.
More about Xavier RAGOT and his research
Read more about the IRMAC project on the ANR's website
Implementing Helicopter Money: A Randomized Policy Evaluation (Helimon)
ANR Grant awarded in 2020
Awardee : Johannes BOEHM
Objective
With interest rates at zero, central banks need to rely on unconventional policy measures to stimulate the economy. We propose a specific form of a direct monetary transfer to households and evaluate its impact on consumption using a randomized controlled trial. We design the transfer in a way that is politically and economically feasible, and, if the trial is successful, could be scaled to the national scale.
More about Johannes BOEHM and his research
Read more about the HELIMON project on the ANR's website
occupation mobility and wage dynamics within and between firms (omwd)
ANR Grant awarded in 2019
Coordinator : Jean-Marc ROBIN (with Francis KRAMARZ and Fabien POSTEL-VINAY)
Objective
Recent research has emphasized the key importance of the equilibrium allocation of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs or occupations as a determinant of economic efficiency. Most of the literature on this subject envisions worker reallocation as occurring between employers. Yet, the data suggest that a very large amount of reallocation occurs within firms, in the form of internal promotions or demotions.
We want to construct a model with internal and external labor markets. Internal labor markets mediate occupational mobility and wage dynamics within firms, whereas the external labor market refers to occupational mobility with employer change, and related wage dynamics. We use “occupation” to refer to a set of job characteristics, which may include industry (e.g., manufacturing, services, etc.) and/or the degree of managerial responsibility that goes with the job (e.g. unskilled worker, supervisor, manager, etc.).
The aim of this construction is to understand and quantify the forces at work in a labor market where, at one extreme, workers spend their entire careers with one single employer (as was the norm in France in the three decades following WWII), gradually moving up some hierarchical ladder within a single firm, and at the other extreme, workers change employers regularly to prevent their career from stalling. Intuitively, the first type of equilibrium is stable if there is little complementarity between worker skill and firm technology. Biased technical progress, however, increases complementarity at the same time as total factor productivity (TFP), and is responsible for the observed shift in workers' careers from a single “job-for-life” to a sequence of different employments. Our research project therefore addresses important issues covered by the ANR research theme “Innovation and labor”.
More about Jean-Marc ROBIN and his research
Read more about the OMWD project on the ANR's website
economics of housing and public policy evaluation (echoppe)
ANR Grant awarded in October 2017 for a duration of 48 monthes
Partner : Etienne WASMER for the LIEPP (with Pierre-Henri BONO, Guillaume CHAPELLE, and Florian OSWALD)
Objective
Housing is a critical target of public policy in France. Our proposal aims at filling the gap that exists in France in terms of evaluating housing policies using general equilibrium economic modelling. Its overarching scientific purpose is to deepen our understanding on the long run impact of housing policies on housing inequalities in France and across countries.
Housing is a primary good, defined by John Rawls as desirable to any citizen, thus a common base for social justice. Public policies are explicitly targeted to the reduction of housing inequality with respect to laissez-faire. An extended set of policies (social housing, taxes and subsidies to renting or accessing ownership, rent controls, lower bounds of social housing for municipalities etc.) have been used to reach that goal but we do not know much about how successful they have been. Even from a purely descriptive view point, we cannot assess whether housing inequality in France is lower than in the US, the UK or Germany and by how much. Such a comparison would contrast countries between laissez-faire and intervention. Research in housing economics is undertaken in many research centers in France although the number of researchers involved remains small. The crucial importance of a high-quality public debate about housing policies in France cannot be enough emphasized given the large budgetary efforts at stake. This is why we propose to create ECHOPPE, a decentralized laboratory on the issue, which will provide a scientific environment for researchers in housing economics in France. This would coordinate their research effort and further our knowledge of housing economics. This “open laboratory” would favor scientific exchanges between a large group of researchers located in Aix-Marseille, Paris and Toulouse. Each researcher involved has already carried out research on the impact of housing policies, housing inequalities, social housing, economic geography or housing supply. Our project will formalize this cooperation and will open a platform accessible by all researchers in housing economics. Specifically, we will organize workshops and other exchanges (seminars) to invite national or international researchers in economics, but also in other disciplines working in housing-related fields.
More about Etienne WASMER and his research
More about Florian OSWALD and his research
Consult the ECHOPPE project's website
Read more about the ECHOPPE project on the ANR's website
Center for the Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP)
ANR Grant "Laboratoire d'excellence" (LABX), awarded in April 2011 until December 2022
Coordinator : Etienne WASMER
Objective
The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP) aims to play a major role in evaluating various aspects of public policy through an innovative method based on multidisciplinarity and the combination of qualitative, comparative, and quantitative analysis.
LIEPP also aims to develop and disseminate the best academic methods and research in the field of policy evaluation.
LIEPP supports several research projects and most of them are already part of the various research groups (Discriminations and social inequalities; Evaluation of democracy; Educational policies; and Socio-fiscal policies). Co-directed by experienced researchers from different disciplines, the research groups guarantee an interdisciplinary approach.
