We investigate the effects of the February 1, 1982, mandatory reduction of weekly working hours in France. Just after Francois Mitterrand's election in 1981, the minimum wage was increased by 5 percent. The workweek was then reduced from 40 to 39 hours. At the same time, stable monthly earnings...

Contracting out public services to private firms has ambiguous effects when quality is imperfectly observable. Using a randomized experiment over a national sample in France, we compare the efficiency of the public employment service (PES) vs. private providers in delivering very similar...

This paper implements a method to identify and estimate treatment effects in a dynamic setting where treatments may occur at any point in time. By relating the standard matching approach to the timing-of-events approach, it demonstrates that effects of the treatment on the treated at a given...