Inter-temporal preferences and the quality of job entry: three microeconometric applications.

Summary By opposing "the passion for present enjoyment" to "the desire to improve our condition", Adam Smith underlined, as early as 1776, the crucial importance of intertemporal preferences in explaining the wealth and economic prosperity of nations. At the microeconomic level, the modeling of intertemporal choices leads to an interest in the psychological interest rate that an economic agent claims when he has to arbitrate between a present and a future consumption unit. The intertemporal trade-off and the effects of impatience are present in two of the main behavioral models in labor economics: human capital theory and job search theory. However, in most of the models derived from these two theories, the inclusion of intertemporal preferences faces two problems. The first problem is that the modeling of intertemporal preferences is limited to the simple introduction of a discount factor. The second problem is that for the econometrician, present preference behaviors belong to the domain of unobservable heterogeneity factors. In this thesis, we address a particular dimension of the role of intertemporal preferences on labor market entry quality. More precisely, we aim to shed light on the impact of intertemporal preferences (impatience) on the unemployment exit rate, on the heterogeneity of outcomes during the transition from unemployment to employment and finally on the decision to take vocational training and its consequences on the wage in the job.