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.

This project aims at investigating how environmental conditions are intrinsically incorporated in the interplay among land uses in urban regions as a two-ways relationship. We argue that the literature is inconclusive on the adequate shape of environmentally friendly cities because the urban internal structure of city is overlooked. We first shed light on environmental attributes across the urban system to identify similar and divergent trends linked to the urban structure. Then, we provide analysis of environmental trade-offs on a sample of urban regions. This proposal is innovative in three respects (i) the knowledge it will provide by linking the internal structure of cities to the heterogeneity in behaviors and to the feedback effect between land uses and urban structure; (ii) the confrontation of cutting edge econometrics and scaling laws viewpoints on cities coming respectively from economics and geography/statistical physics and (iii) the policy recommendations.