Research articles
Published papers & work under review
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« Stratégie familiale de gestion des chocs : l’offre de travail des épouses en réponse aux fermetures
d’entreprise en Argentine », Revue Économique, 65, pp. 537-566, 2014 (CNRS #2).
Cet article a pour objectif d’étudier le rôle de la famille comme mécanisme d’assurance lorsqu’un
choc touche le revenu du travail du pourvoyeur principal du ménage. En incertitude, le modèle du
cycle de vie prédit qu’un tel choc a un impact positif sur l’offre de travail de son conjoint. Données
de panel à l’appui, nous testons l’existence de cet « effet travailleur additionnel » (ETA) lors de
la récession argentine. L’endogénéité inhérente aux variables inobservables et à la simultanéité
des décisions des deux époux est contrôlée en introduisant des effets fixes individuels, et en
utilisant les fermetures d’entreprise comme un choc exogène négatif de revenu. Le modèle est
estimé par différence de différence avec appariement. Le motif stratégique rend compte de 12,5%
de l’augmentation totale de la participation féminine. Une femme a 13 points de pourcentage de
chance supplémentaire d’entrer sur le marché du travail si son conjoint perd son emploi. A la
marge intensive, la participation reste inchangée.
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« Crisis at Home: Mancession-Induced Change in Intrahousehold Distribution », with O. Bargain
(Aix-Marseille University), February 2016. Under review in the Economic Journal.
The Great Recession was essentially a ‘mancession’ in countries like Spain or the US, i.e. it hit
men harder than women for they were disproportionately represented in heavily affected sectors.
We investigate how the mancession, and more generally women’s relative opportunities on the
labor market, translate in intrahousehold distribution. Precisely, we estimate a collective model
of consumption on Spanish data over 2006-2011. We exploit the gender-oriented evolution of the
economic environment to test original distribution factors. We first use regional-time variation in
relative unemployment risks over the period. We find that the resource share accruing to Spanish
wives increased by around 5-8 percent on average in stable marriages, following the improvement
of their relative labor market positions. Then, a difference-in-difference approach embedded in
the structural model confirms the magnitude of this effect by exploiting the gender-differentiated
shock in the construction sector. Among childless couples, we document a 6-12 percent decline in
individual consumption inequality following the crisis, which is essentially due to intrahousehold
redistribution.
Working Papers
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« Intrahousehold Coping Mechanisms in Hard Times: the Added Worker Effect in the 2001 Argentine
Economic Crisis » (Job Market)
This paper shows that the added-worker effect (AWE) plays an important role in coping against
aggregate shocks, even in cases where the discouragement effect prevails at a macroeconomic scale.
Using an Argentine panel dataset between 2000-2002, we instrument the endogenous variation
in the labor market outcomes of household heads using the collapse of the convertibility era as
a natural experiment, and measure its causal impact on their spouses’ labor supply decisions.
Within this framework, we show that a woman whose husband experiences the average decline in
income (resp. looses his job) is 4.4 percentage points more likely to enter the labor market (resp.
43 percentage points). Out of four new entrants, three work at least one hour weekly, and one
even finds a full time job. Heterogeneous effects are in line with expectations, robustness checks
support the validity of our empirical strategy, and our results are robust to various sensitivity
tests.
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