Economists have paid very little attention to the role of working conditions in sickness absence. Yet, bad working conditions are a potential determinant of labour supply, either directly or through their impact on health. This study tries to shed some light on this issue. To begin with, we...

We try to quantify the effect of working conditions on retirement behaviour by estimating an implicit cost of keeping on working in a bad job. The cost is measured by the amount of the increase in retirement pension that the employee would claim to accept to postpone the date on which he intends...

In France the female labor force participation has doubled over the last thirty years. But at the same time part-time work and unemployment developed considerably. So it is not sure that the female labor force participation measured by the number of hours worked still increases. Subsequently the...

We explore the patterns of localisation in the French manufacturing and service industries using the distance-based approach developed by Duranton and Overman (2005). The idea of this methodology is to consider the distribution of distances between pairs of plants in an industry and to compare...

Due to their early release, Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) are widely used in short term forecasting. Their questions are mainly qualitative; answers are most often used to calculate balances of opinions, which are defined as the difference between the proportions of positive answers with...

The two oil shocks of the 1970s reduced the GDP growth rate. Since that period, sudden oil price increases have been considered as a major source of economic slowdown. We estimate VAR models and Markov-Switching models to evaluate the impact of oil price increases on French growth. Our results...

Job flows (job creations and job destructions) and worker flows (hires and quits) are central to recent analysis of labor market. The scale of gross job flows (creations + destructions) compared to net job flows (creations - destructions) has a part in the renewal of Schumpeterian analysis. It...

In spite of prevalent views among economists and business management experts in favour of corporate focus development strategies still lack empirical evidence. The concepts of diversification and product refocusing of firms businesses are difficult to express with quantitative indicators, as the...

As schumpeterian creative destruction is increasingly popular, this leads to focus on high-growth firms. These firms have been called gazelles by Birch. Among the SME employing 20 to 250 workers in 1993 and still alive in 2003, the top 5% of the distribution of growth - henceforth called...

The recent rise in oil prices has brought concern about its eventual impact on economic growth. However, empirical studies seem to be reassuring. Actually, the link between oil prices and GDP growth estimated since the mid 80s is not as strong as it was before the mid 80s. Several explanations...