Since the 2008 financial crisis, European governments have implemented numerous reforms on the anticompetitive Product Market Regulation (PMR), which are the laws and rules in network and service industry that may restrict competition and firm choices. These reforms are supported by international organizations, such as the IMF and the OECD, and by an abundant literature finding a negative impact of PMR on innovation and productivity. However, the PMR impact on labor market outcomes are mostly unknown. As labor markets performances are bad in most European countries, it’s essential to fill this gap and the main objective of this project is to investigate the PMR impact on employment rate, wage inequality, notably between men and women, and other labor market outcomes for 31 European countries. To understand in depth the impact of PMR on labor market outcomes, the empirical investigations will be supported by original theoretical contributions and both empirical and theoretical contributions will emphasize the major role played by innovation. Moreover, we will pay special attention to environmental innovations, as they are particularly important for sustained growth, but also because they may have very different effects on the labor market. In addition, we will take into account the PMR complementarities with labor market regulations, particularly employment protection legislation, unemployment benefit and minimum wage, to enrich our analyses and prevent omission bias in the investigation of PMR impact. Most papers analysing the PMR impact on innovation use cross-country-industry panel data, as PMR are implemented at this level. However, workers are mobile between industries, so the industry level data are less relevant to investigate the global impact on labor market outcomes. In the same time, firm level investigations may identify the regulation impact on innovative firm employment and wages, but miss the spillover effects on the other firms due to the creative-destruction process. Our identification strategy will bring together industry and local labor market data to overcome this challenge. A local labor market is a geographical area within which most workers reside and work, and in which establishments can find most of the labour force needed to fill the jobs offered. Therefore, this is a relevant level of analysis for employment rate, inequality and other labor market outcomes. Our approach will allow to test whether the PMR impact on a local labor market depend on the industry composition of this market. Specifically, we will tests two hypotheses. First, that the impact of an industry regulation on a local labor market depend of its share of workers employed in this regulated industry. Second, that the impact of an industry regulation on a local labor market depend also of its share of workers employed in industries using intermediate inputs produced by the regulated industry. These tests results will provide interesting insights on the causality between PMR and labor market evolutions. These empirical investigations will benefit from an individual database using data from the Eurostat Labor Force Survey database merged with the Community Innovation Survey and several industry level OECD databases, to cover 281 European local labor markets and the 1985-2016 period. These investigations will also benefits from an estimator for multi-dimensional panels developed in this project. Our project will allow to assess the potential impact of PMR and labor market regulation reforms on labor market outcomes for 31 European countries and 281 local labor markets, and notably to identify among these lasts the potential winners and losers from reforms. The impact of this project on the national and international debate as well as on the policymakers will be reinforced by the free provision of a software allowing to compute easily the numerous expected effects of PMR and labor market regulation reforms.

The socio-economic central theme of this project is composed of several issues concerning land use: its description, its evolution, its impact on natural resources and the impact of public policies on land use. The evolution of the socio-economic context in which the productive and residential choices are done is conditioned by relatively recent events: climatic change, tensions on the real estate market, agricultural policy reforms, new environmental regulations. We are interested in consequences of such phenomena on the sustainable management of natural resources, the development planning and the territorial management. The data at hand to understand these phenomena is always attached to geographical space and this particular nature has not always been accounted for in econometric approaches of these problems. Our general objective is to propose models for these phenomena which properly take into account the fundamental spatial nature of the data and which use the most recent spatial econometric advances. We are interested in the patterns and changes between the three broad categories of land use: agriculture, urban and other uses. The objective is then to analyze the determinants of this evolution and to try to better understand their economic and environmental effects. Such modeling can then be used to evaluate, among other applications, regional emission levels of greenhouse gases due to land use changes between agriculture and forest, since forests constitute a carbon sink (net absorption), while crops and cattle are positive and major contributors to the global emission level of greenhouse gases. Another application that will be considered is the impact of land-use changes on environmental pressure indicators regarding nitrogen emissions (from organic and mineral sources) and water withdrawal. We also intend to model the production decisions by French farmers, in order to identify the determinants which would not be captured by purely economic or agro-pedoclimatic variables, thus explaining the observed bottlenecks on specialization or adoption of new production modes (MAE or CAB) in some regions. We are also interested in modeling residential water demand as a function of the pricing policy of water utilities in French local communities. A first question will be related to the valuation of (positive) amenities from forestry in terms of improving raw water quality at the local level, and through the reduction in water pretreatment costs. As water price will ultimately be determined by management modes chosen by the municipality but also by the local conditions for water utility operation, the second question the project will address is the impact of the geographic proximity of communities in the decision of management modes of local public services for water distribution and for its price. From the statistical point of view, the common denominator of our models is the family of autoregressive spatial models developed in the spatial econometrics literature, which we use for the spatio-temporal models as well as the discrete choice spatial models. The issues that are common to these models concern spillover effects assessment, predictions evaluation, model selection. Another common concern is also to explore alternative models issued from the spatial statistics literature which is more concerned by modeling continuous fields. These are precisely among the directions recently emphasized by the leading authors in spatial econometrics.

In France as in most developed countries, designing an efficient system of public financing for long-term care is one of the most striking challenges of the next two decades. But the deep lack of knowledge we face make the task rather uncertain. In this context, the main aim of this project is to establish some quantitative empirical evidences about how economic parameters, such as the private cost of formal home help for disabled elderly, impact their care arrangements. Getting an estimation of the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help and of its effect on informal care will allow us to simulate the consequences of some reforms of the public financing scheme on care arrangements (quantity of home help provided by formal and informal caregivers), on the amount of public resources allocated to the elderly and on its distribution among them, according to income and disability level. Method The scarcity of econometrical research devoted to the impact of the cost of care in ageing economics is mainly due to the difficulty to collect precise data on prices and out of pocket expenditures, since, in many countries, this field of public policy is decentralized: the way public benefits are calculated thus differs according to the geographical location of the claimant. The French minister for health and social affairs will produce next year a specific survey, called CARE, which will include all the information needed to estimate our parameters of interest with standard econometric strategies, but will not be renewed afterwards. We thus propose, first, to use this survey to estimate the impact of private cost of formal help on care arrangement with standard models and methods and, second, to use the results as a benchmark for original alternative strategies, which require less specific data but rely on more sophisticated methods (partial identification) and take advantage on a precise knowledge of the decentralized rules of public financing. These alternative strategies will be implemented with administrative surveys used routinely for the follow-up of APA beneficiaries, the Handicap-Santé survey, which is renew every ten years, and a specific survey, called "Territories", conducted by our research team in 2012, in which we collected information from 73 metropolitan Conseils généraux on their practices regarding home services price-setting and demand subsidization. This gives to the project a methodological dimension since we will be able to evaluate estimation strategies, which could be usefull for analysing other fields of decentralized public policies. Working program Three alternative strategies will be implemented in the first part of the project : 1/ Estimating the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help, using data of one specific department: in this case, the Territoires survey allows us to calculate the exact private cost of one hour of home help for APA beneficiaries cared by a service whose price was set by the local government. We already have the result for one département and will work on another one to test the robustness of our results. 2/ Estimating the price-elasticity of the demand for formal home help, using a sample of APA beneficiary gathered by the Health minister across 66 départements and partial identification methods : in this case, information is too poor to calculate the exact individual private cost, but the Territoires survey will allow us to establish a range of cost for each department. 3/ Estimating the impact of the amount of formal home help on informal care, through a bivariate model, using the Handicap Santé Survey. The Territoires survey will in this case offer proper instruments for the amount of formal home help in order to deal with the simultaneity of decisions regarding formal and informal care. In the second part of the project, we will use our estimation results to build a simulation model and analyze the impact of various reforms of price-setting and subsidization.