MEJEAN Isabelle

In this note we study the adaptation of French plastic waste exporters to a sudden drop in global demand for these products. For this we use the experience provided by China's decision to ban plastic waste imports in 2017. After the ban, there is a sharp increase in exports to other Asian countries, but this shift appears to be short-lived, unlike the shift to the EU. Furthermore, the changing structure of French exports suggests a form of polarization of plastic waste flows between destinations. In view of these results, we examine the possible impact of new regulations put in place by the EU, which aim to considerably reduce European exports of plastic waste.

In this note, we use China’s ban of plastic waste imports in 2017 as a natural experiment of a sudden drop in the world demand for plastic waste. We study how French exporters have adjusted, both in terms of quantities exported, destinations, and prices. After the ban, exports to other Asian countries increased sharply, but this redirection appears to be short-lived, unlike redirection towards other EU countries. In addition, there is suggestive evidence of a polarization of the quality of plastic waste exports between destinations. In light of our findings, we discuss the possible impact of new European regulations that will drastically reduce European exports of plastic waste.

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This thesis is in the fields of international economics and labor economics, and focuses on firm growth. Firm dynamics play a key role in determining aggregate outcomes. Understanding how firms grow is therefore critical to understanding economic growth, innovation, and the functioning of the labor market. Frictions, both in the goods market and in the labor market, are one of the factors slowing down the growth of firms. On the one hand, informational and contractual frictions between sellers and buyers prevent firms from acquiring new buyers. On the other hand, labor market frictions, by increasing the costs of hiring and firing workers, limit the efficient reallocation of workers across firms, which slows the growth of firms in domestic and foreign markets. This thesis analyzes the impact of these two types of frictions on firm growth and survival.The first chapter identifies the causal impact of poaching salespeople from rival firms on a firm's ability to grow its international customer portfolio. The final two chapters focus on the effect of labor market frictions, and specifically the effect of labor market policies, on firm growth and survival. The second chapter describes judicial bias in labor courts and how it can affect the growth prospects of sued firms. The third chapter deals with industry agreements and highlights a mechanism by which large firms can use industry bargaining as an anticompetitive device.

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We study the cross-sectional dispersion of prices paid by EMU importers for French products. We document a significant level of dispersion in unit values both within product categories across exporters, and within exporters across buyers. This latter source of price discrepancies, which we call price discrimination, reflects the ability of exporters to sell similar or differentiated varieties of a given product at different prices to different buyers. Price discrimination (i) is substantial within the EU, within the euro area, and within EMU countries. (ii) has not decreased over the last two decades. (iii) is more prevalent among the largest firms and for more differentiated products. (iv) is lower among retailers and wholesalers. (v) is also observed within almost perfectly homogenous product categories, which suggests that a non-negligible share of price discrimination is partly triggered by heterogeneous markups rather than quality or composition effects. We then estimate a rich statistical decomposition of the variance of prices to shed light on exporters' pricing strategies.

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Before spreading worldwide, the coronavirus epidemic appeared in Hubei province. To contain the spread of the virus, the Chinese government imposed quarantine measures, resulting in a slowdown in economic activity. Here we examine how this slowdown in production, initially limited to Hubei province, spreads to the global economy via international value chains. Dependence on Chinese inputs has increased dramatically since the early 2000s. As a result, most countries are exposed to the Chinese slowdown, both directly through their imports of Chinese intermediates and indirectly, through Chinese value added incorporated into other production inputs. This note quantifies France's total exposure compared to that of other countries. First, we calculate the share of Chinese value added in French production. Then, we use country- and sector-level data to quantify the impact of quarantine measures on French GDP.

Before spreading globally, the Covid-19 epidemic was concentrated in the Hubei province. To contain the spread of the virus, the Chinese government has imposed quarantine measures and travel restrictions, entailing the slowdown of economic activity. We study the propagation of this geographically concentrated productivity slowdown to the global economy, through global value chains. Reliance on Chinese inputs has dramatically increased since the early 2000s. As a consequence, most countries are exposed to the Chinese productivity slowdown, both directly through their imports of Chinese inputs and indirectly, through other inputs themselves produced with some Chinese value added. This note aims at quantifying the total exposure of France compared to other countries. First, we compute the share of Chinese value added in French production. Then, we use data at the country and sector levels to quantify the impact of travel restrictions on French GDP.

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How can disturbances at the level of the individual become large fluctuations at the level of the economy? This question, despite being studied for decades, is still open. In this book, I investigate this puzzle using methods from statistical physics. Starting from an in-depth analysis of power-law distributions, I show that a clear understanding of their origin and properties allows us to better understand their socio-economic consequences. I then propose a model of a network economy, where firms depend on each other to produce, so that the very nature of their interactions can make them susceptible to amplify fluctuations. I then provide an empirical study of the statistical properties of growth rates and a framework for studying their dynamics. In the final part I focus on models that exhibit non-trivial collective phenomena because they consider imitation or memory effects in the decisions taken by individuals, showing the need to take into account the possible complexity of the different constituent parts of economic models.

More than three years after the unexpected Brexit vote of June 2016, there is still no exit agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union. Although the conditions of Brexit and the corresponding economic consequences are still unknown, the referendum has already had a real economic impact. The long discussion surrounding Brexit can be seen as a long-lasting uncertainty shock, whiach has affected firms’ investment decisions. In this note we use highly detailed customs data before and after the vote to measure the impact of Brexit on French firms’ exports to the UK. We find that the referendum had no effect on average on the value of exports but depressed export growth in sectors such as transportation or chemical industries which are more upstream in value chains. The number of new trade relationships involving French exporters and British importers has significantly declined after the Brexit vote, in comparison with other destinations. This is consistent with the uncertainty shock reducing French firms’ investment in their customer base, which is likely to penalize French exporters in the future. These results are suggestive evidence that uncertainty has a real cost and that any decision of delaying the Brexit further should compare the benefit of reaching a better deal with the economic cost induced by uncertainty. It is also important that the next EU-UK trade agreement should guarantee the stability and predictability of the trade policy that European exporters will have to face.

More than three years after the unexpected outcome of the June 2016 Brexit vote, no exit agreement has yet been signed between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The conditions under which the Brexit will take place and their economic consequences are still unknown, but the referendum is already having measurable effects on the real economy.The vote and the lengthy negotiations that followed represent a lasting shock of uncertainty, which has affected business investment decisions. In this note we use detailed trade data before and after the vote to measure the effect of the vote on French exports to the UK. We show that the referendum had on average no effect on the value of exports but reduced the growth of exports in sectors such as transport equipment or chemicals that are placed furthest upstream in value chains. The number of new trade relationships involving French exporters and British importers declined significantly after the Brexit vote, compared to other destinations. The uncertainty shock appears to have reduced French firms' investment in business development, which will likely penalize exporters in the future. These results suggest that uncertainty represents a real cost. Any decision to postpone Brexit must take into account not only the possibility of getting a better deal but also the economic cost of prolonging uncertainty. It is also important that the future trade agreement between the United Kingdom and the EU installs a trade policy that European exporters can anticipate, and that the agreement ensures stability.

This thesis studies the meeting and matching between French firms and their buyers on international markets. Building a portfolio of foreign buyers is a crucial component of exporters' growth: sales to new buyers explain nearly 50% of the differences in export growth rates between French firms in the medium term. However, in international markets, geographical distance, cultural and institutional differences exacerbate the difficulties that firms have in finding potential buyers, Rauch (2001), Allen (2014) and Arkolakis (2010). This thesis studies and quantifies the effect of informational barriers and financial constraints that firms face when canvassing foreign buyers.This thesis relies on exhaustive data detailing all French intra-community exports over the last twenty years. In particular, for each transaction, the exporting French firm, the product and the amount of the transaction as well as the buyer by its intra-Community VAT number are identified.The first chapter examines how search frictions in international goods markets can distort competition between firms with heterogeneous productivity. The second chapter examines the role of liquidity constraints in building a customer base abroad. The final chapter examines the importance of managers' networks and contacts in the expansion of firms' exports.

This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business-cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added and international linkages over the period 1993-2007. At the micro level, trade and multinational linkages with a particular foreign country are associated with a significantly higher correlation between a firm and that foreign country. The impact of direct linkages on comovement at the micro level has significant macro implications. Without those linkages the correlation between France and foreign countries would fall by about 0.098, or one-third of the observed average correlation of 0.291 in our sample of partner countries. (JEL F14, F23, F44, F62, L14) Countries that exhibit greater bilateral trade and multinational production linkages have more correlated business cycles (Frankel and Rose 1998. Kleinert, Martin, and Toubal 2015). While the empirical literature has repeatedly confirmed the trade-comovement relationship in the data, its meaning is not well understood, either empirically or quantitatively. Taken at face value, the positive association between bilateral trade and multinational linkages and comovement is often interpreted as evidence of transmission of shocks across countries through those linkages. The empirical literature has faced two related challenges. The first is the critique by Imbs (2004) that countries that trade more with each other are similar in other ways, and thus subject to common shocks. Under an extreme version of this view, the trade linkage variable in the Frankel-Rose specification does not reflect the.

This project, born from the RMT Fertilisation et Environnement, aims to develop a prototype of a nitrogen fertilisation management tool for perennial plants, based on an already existing and innovative tool, used on field crops (AzoFert®) and based on the balance method. The emphasis is on the fact that the project must result in a generic prototype and not specific to a region. The prototype is presented in computerized form, with access via the Internet. The user must enter several categories of data: location, soil, crop (crop itinerary, target yield). An operational and user-friendly interface has been developed, although improvements are still needed. The results obtained with the N-Perennes prototype are encouraging in viticulture compared to empirical recommendations (50% of correct recommendations). In arboriculture, the lack of experimental references has led to a low number of validations. In order for the prototype to become an operational tool, programming and parameterization work will have to be carried out, as well as validation on a larger number of situations, particularly in real conditions of use of the tool. Other perspectives, widening the objective of the prototype, are also possible.

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This thesis deals with different themes in the field of international economics and macroeconomics. The research developed in this thesis studies the impact of shocks of various kinds on international migration flows, international trade and productivity growth. The first chapter focuses on the evolution of migration flows in response to cyclical shocks. The estimation of the model from the data allows us to conclude that both structural and cyclical shocks influence migration flows. A 10 percent increase in the destination country's wage would lead to an increase in migration flows to that destination country of nearly 8 percent, all else being equal. The second chapter studies the extent to which financial shocks affect the level of firms' exports, with a particular focus on firms that export to distant destinations. We find that firms that face financial frictions export between 4% and 10% less than those that do not. Our results also show that among exporters facing financial frictions, those that export to distant destinations reduce their exports even more. In chapter three, we study how financial frictions can lead to distortions in resource allocation. Our results suggest that in financially developed countries, capital does not necessarily improve the efficient allocation of labor across firms.

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Conventional aggregate trade elasticity estimates hardly vary across countries. We introduce an aggregate elasticity that is implied by theory: It is the value that equates the welfare gains from trade as implied by one- and multi-sector versions of the model in Arkolakis et al. (American Economic Review, 102 (2012):94–130). These estimates are predicated on sector-level values for trade elasticites, which we provide at three-digit levels for 28 developed and developing countries. The values for this aggregate elasticity vary greatly across countries, and they do so because of countries' patterns of production and because a given sector-level elasticity displays considerable cross-country heterogeneity.

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This thesis aims to analyze and identify the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the French labor market. The first chapter reviews the recent literature on this issue. The other chapters analyze empirically and theoretically the effect of FDI on the labor market. Using recent and detailed data on French firms and employees, several aspects of the labor market are addressed. First, the thesis analyzes the effect of FDI on employment (chapter 2), and then focuses on its effect on French wages (chapter 3). Chapter 4 identifies a potential channel through which FDI could affect the labor market. This channel is organizational change within the parent company. Finally, chapter 5 identifies the consequences of organizational change in terms of labor mobility within multinational firms. The results show a selective effect of FDI on employment and wages. Only FDI to a low-wage country affects the labor market and only managers are positively impacted by firms' foreign location strategies. Employment seems to be the adjustment variable at the extensive margin, while wages adjust at the intensive margin. FDI is also responsible for an organizational change within the parent company, causing a shift of authority from the head of the firm to the managers on the one hand, and an increase in the mobility of skilled workers within the firm on the other.

On average, estimates of trade elasticities are smaller in aggregate data than at sector level. This is an artifact of aggregation. Estimations performed on aggregate data constrain sector elasticities to homogeneity, which creates a heterogeneity bias. The paper shows such a bias exists in two prominent approaches used to estimate elasticities, which has meaningful consequences for the calibration of the trade elasticity in one-sector, aggregative models. With elasticities calibrated to aggregate data, macroeconomic models can have predictions at odds with the implications of their multi-sector counterparts. They do not when elasticities are calibrated using a weighted average of sector elasticities.

This thesis aims to explain three major economic facts: excessive urban sprawl, unemployment dispersion, and trade hierarchy. In the first chapter, I construct and calibrate a simple labor market matching model in which the residential density of workers is endogenous. Using this analytical framework I show that the structure of the labor market creates significant excess sprawl. I identify the fact that firms compensate for the transportation costs of employees as the major source of this inefficiency. Finally, I point out that optimality can be restored if the government implements mileage compensation. The second chapter questions the fact that although it has been established that cities are characterized by a high dispersion of unemployment, segregation models remain the standard framework of urban and labor economics. In particular, I show that the classical model of this literature explains the dispersion of unemployment if the residential environment affects workers' preferences. In the third chapter, co-authored with Antoine Vatan, we show that whether firms follow a trade hierarchy depends very strongly on their experience as exporters. Then, we develop a simple and dynamic model that addresses the new empirical fact that we have highlighted. Namely, we show that this new fact can be explained by a trade-off between attractiveness and competition, the latter being present in any model of monopolistic competition with sequential exporting.

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We study how competition from low-wage countries in international markets affects the quality content of high-wage country exports. We focus on aggregate quality changes driven by a reallocation of sales from low- to high-quality exporters, within industries. Two alternative indicators are used on firm-level data to measure quality changes. Both lead to similar conclusions. Namely, we show that the mean quality of French exports increased by 10–15% between 1995 and 2005. Quality improvement is significantly more pronounced in markets in which competition from low-wage countries has increased the most. This holds true for various specifications including two different identification strategies. The results are consistent with competition from low-wage countries leading developed countries to specialize within industries in the production of higher quality goods.

What is the impact of monetary unions on the integration of goods markets? We address this issue by investigating the effect of the euro on French exporters' pricing strategies toward members of the eurozone. We adopt a difference-in-difference strategy and estimate that the single currency reduced the relative dispersion of export prices in the eurozone by 1 percentage point in comparison to the rest of the European Union. Moreover, we show that the single currency has affected large firms more strongly. When we take this heterogeneity into account, we find a stronger impact for the euro, by 4 percentage points.

The paper evaluates the empirical effects of labor market institutions (LMI) on foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions using an individual dataset describing French firms’ expansion strategies in OECD countries over 1992–2002. First, we provide evidence that labor market institutions do matter in location decisions. Precisely, we show that labor market rigidity significantly reduces the country’s attractiveness for foreign investors. Yet, the effect is of limited magnitude compared to FDI determinants related to the country’s market potential or supply access. Second, we go deeper in the precise role of various LMI dimensions. In line with the literature, we find that stringent employment protection laws have a dampening effect on the location probability. Besides, we show that this is not the only dimension that matters. In particular, we find that the generosity of the unemployment benefit system plays a significant negative role on the country’s attractiveness, even once the role of employment protection is controlled for. Copyright Kiel Institute 2014.

Numerous studies highlight the existence of substantial costs affecting international trade flows. By creating a segmentation of international markets, these trade barriers affect the global equilibrium in open macroeconomics. However, most macroeconomic models ignore this feature of the international economy and assume perfect market integration. This thesis studies the macroeconomic impact of this segmentation of international markets. The tools developed by the New Trade Theories are used to model the effect of trade barriers on the strategic decisions of exporting firms in a globalized environment. The first part of the thesis focuses on the consequences of market segmentation on export pricing strategies. The empirical analysis highlights the microeconomic determinants that explain the low sensitivity of trade prices to exchange rate fluctuations. The second part introduces the analysis of firms' location choices and studies their impact on the level of relative prices. It shows how the entry of new producers into a national market exerts downward pressure on its aggregate price level. Finally, the third part of the thesis examines the impact of these location choices on the efficiency of economic policies. More precisely, it shows how national minimum wage policies affect the spatial distribution of firms, through relative production costs but also through their impact on aggregate demand.

Numerous studies highlight the existence of substantial costs affecting international trade flows. By creating a segmentation of international markets, these trade barriers affect the global equilibrium in open macroeconomics. However, most macroeconomic models ignore this feature of the international economy and assume perfect market integration. The three parts that make up this thesis study the impact of this segmentation of international markets on macroeconomic equilibrium. The tools developed by the New Trade Theories are used to model the impact of trade barriers on the strategic decisions of firms in a globalized environment. The first part of the thesis focuses on the consequences of market segmentation on export pricing strategies. The empirical analysis highlights the microeconomic determinants that explain the low sensitivity of trade prices to exchange rate fluctuations. The second part introduces the analysis of firms' location choices and studies their impact on the level of relative prices. It shows how the entry of new producers into a national market exerts downward pressure on its aggregate price level. Finally, the third part of the thesis examines the impact of these location choices on the efficiency of economic policies. More precisely, it shows how national minimum wage policies affect the spatial distribution of firms, through the relative costs of production but also through their impact on aggregate demand.