ERUDITE research projects

The informal economy encapsulates informal employment of the workers in the informal sector, the formal sector and households, who do not benefit from social protection (ILO, 2013, Charmes, 2019). It plays a significant role with respect to job and wealth creation in the MENA countries, wherein it accounts for over half the total of non-agricultural employment (ILO, 2018), but this role is controversial in terms of development. The informal economy exerts a negative influence, regarding low level of productivity and high precariousness of the jobs created, as well as a substantial tax shortfall and a duality in the business environment that endangers the regulatory framework. The informal economy, however, generates jobs and incomes, acting as a safety valve for the least protected segments of the population.

The labour market segmentation dividing formal and informal employment goes hand in hand with an income gap (wage gap) between the men of employed women. Women in North Africa make up on average less than a quarter of the urban labour force, which is one of the lowest rates in the world (World Bank, 2018). Despite a much lower participation rate in labour force, women participate in informal activities at least as much as men (ILO, 2012). In Algeria, the rate of informal female employment (24%) in the private sector is higher than that of men; in Egypt, as in Tunisia, over a quarter of employed women work in the informal sector.

Statistics most often underscore the contribution of women to the informal economy, including within the household, in terms of employment and output as well as income. Since these activities are partly home-based, they are not easily measureable, nor are they investigated or valued as such.

This conference intends to provide a state of the art of the informal economy in Algeria, North Africa and other countries of the MENA region. It will tackle various topics and use different investigation methods. It is part of a gender approach, which aims at identifying the place of women on the labour market in these countries, whereby access to employment allowing them to conquer rights and gain social inclusiveness.

Comparative analysis is strongly encouraged. The communication of this conference will be able to mobilize earnings functions, quantile regressions upon the income distribution and Oaxaca-Blinder models of decomposition, as well as (quasi) experiments of the "before-after" type, with (propensity score) matching and counterfactual, according to gender divide and the formal/informal employment segmentation.

The conference will discuss orientations towards the formalisation of the informal sector and informal employment (taxation, regulation and social protection), as well as gender inequalities on the labour market, with respect to a transition to the formal economy.

Research topics
Contributions will include but are not limited to the following topics:

1. The various approaches (dualist, structuralist, institutional, etc.) as regards the scope, trends and participants of the informal economy: controversies and converging views.
2. Relevance and completeness of measures (direct vs. indirect methods) of the informal economy: Surveys (households vs. enterprises), national accounts and computable general equilibrium, econometric modeling.
3. The determinants of access to the informal sector and informal employment: voluntary choice vs. last resort? What may explain differentiation between men and women: human capital and preferences on the labour supply side and/or profiles requirements on the labour demand side?
4. Female informal wage employment and male / female income differentials: are they industry driven?
5. Informal entrepreneurship and gender: to what extent do aspirations vs. constraints differ?
6. The transition from the informal to the formal economy: tax relief, simplification of regulation and / or extension of social protection? Which devices with respect to efficiency, fairness and costs? Should there be positive discrimination towards women?

A first study (the 1st chapter of Justine Bondoux's thesis) focuses on the impact of the onset of disability on personal income among European older workers. As personal income is defined as the sum of activity income (salaries) and compensation income (retirement, disability, unemployment, etc.), the paper will, in the long term, allow the impact of disability on the different fields of this personal income to be broken down. The main hypothesis of this work is twofold: on the one hand, the onset of disability leads to a drop in productivity on the labour market and therefore a drop in wages, and on the other hand, it allows access to compensation systems and therefore leads to an increase in income. Once the income is broken down, we will then be in a position to conclude as to the effectiveness of the compensation systems in making up for income losses linked to an adverse health event.

A second study looks at the evaluation of the 2005 French law on the employment rate of people with disabilities. This law is an extension of the 1987 law, which introduced coercive measures to encourage companies to hire disabled individuals. Indeed, it became mandatory for any private company with over 20 employees to hire a (fixed) quota of disabled people, under penalty of having to pay a fine if the quota were not met. Barnay and his co-authors showed in a previous study that firms prefer to pay the fine rather than respect the quota (Barnay et al., 2019). Thus, the 2005 law supplements the 1987 law by extending the quotas to the public sector and by increasing the financial penalties for non-compliance. The aim of this contribution is then to see whether or not the strengthening of the 1987 law has led to an increase in the employment rate of disabled individuals.

Finally, the third ongoing study looks at the impact of adverse working conditions on the reporting of disabilities in France. Tracing the entire career of individuals will allow us to measure the different exposures they are confronted with and thus estimate their effect on health and more particularly on the occurrence of disability. In order to have a more detailed analysis, this paper will focus on the different levels of exposure to adverse working conditions. The main aim will then be to estimate the impact of these different levels of exposure on the occurrence of disability.

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The innovative project "BEcome BLOOd Donor/Devenir Donneur de sang" has been selected in the framework of the "Amorçage" call for projects of the Comue Paris-Est. It aims to prepare the elaboration of a new communication strategy by studying different aspects of blood donation in Île-de-France. This multidisciplinary project (ERUDITE, IRG and Établissement français du sang) aims to understand the specificities of the donor population with regard to the population eligible for donation in Île-de-France by crossing quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The following four objectives are pursued:

1) To understand the specificities of the donor population in relation to the population eligible for donation in Ile-de-France

2) To analyse the reasons behind the choice to donate blood or not by disentangling individual effects (age, sex, health status, social class, presence of children, etc.) from contextual effects (access to information, availability of donation centres, availability of donors in relation to their professional status and their working hours or their household chores)

3) To evaluate the intrinsic motivations of donors (altruism, notion of solidarity, risk aversion, degree of information on the use of blood, etc.)

4) In time, to evaluate EFS policies or strategies by mobilising public policy evaluation analyses based on econometric techniques of panel data (semi-experimental methods) and target strategies adapted to mobilise donors of specific erythrocytic phenotypes of certain populations.

A first approach of vulnerability may rely on resilience, defined as the dynamic process by which individuals “cope, adapt and transform in the face of diverse stresses and shocks” (Pelletier et al. 2016). These coping, adaptative and transformative capacities can reduce the likelihood and severity of adverse events occurring in the face of a shock but also the vulnerability of individuals to subsequent shocks. However, these capacities evolve over time, being the result of a complex and changing combination of biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors. Among these factors, childhood experiences and living conditions may have a strong influence, as they are known to affect later-life health (Pakpahan et al. 2017). Moreover, the effects of individual and global economic shocks on the health and resilience of people aged 50 and over remain unclear and little studied. Thus, this work proposes a longitudinal study of childhood influences on the health resilience of individuals over 50 years old after the 2009 economic crisis. As this resilience is likely to vary due to contextual and cultural differences, this work proposes to compare the effects observed between Europe and the United States. To do so, this work will tap in the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) and HRS (Health and Retirement Study) data, two harmonized longitudinal household surveys designed to collect data on the health, socioeconomic status and retrospective life histories of adults aged 50 and over respectively from Europe and the United States. A follow-up analysis will be performed from 2004 to 2017 using a difference-in-difference approach (to control individual and time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity) based on childhood experiences variation combined with matching procedures built on pre-crisis variables (to control observed heterogeneity, selection effect and reverse causality). Regarding the concept of resilience, the outcome variable would first refer to the absence of deterioration in health status after the 2009 economic crisis.

The aim of this thesis is to study the links between work accidents (AT – Accidents du Travail) and the consumption of benzodiazepines, which are psychotropic drugs frequently used to treat anxiety and insomnia. It is based on the use of data from the national health data system (SNDS – Système National des Données de Santé). It is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the consequences of the occurrence of a WA on the consumption and overconsumption of benzodiazepines. Using a selection model, we show that although the AT may constitute a shock that leads to an increase in benzodiazepine consumption, this consumption is not followed by an increase in the overconsumption of these drugs. The second part of the paper, mirroring the first, focuses on the risk of ATs following benzodiazepine use. In particular, we show that there is an increased risk of AT after stopping treatment. The third part concerns the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on the dynamics of benzodiazepine consumption, particularly from a territorial point of view.

Valorisations
First chapter
Barnay, T., Baudot, F.-O. (2020). Work accident effect on the risk of benzodiazepine use and overuse. ERUDITE Working Paper.

Presentations
TEPP 2018, JMA 2019, EuHEA PhD Student-Supervisor 2019, JESF 2019

Project presentation
The liberalisation of energy markets, the transition to renewable sources and the digital revolution are challenging the centralised network model, leading to the transformation of markets, the emergence of new socio-technical interface devices (e.g. advanced metering) and intermediation professions (e.g. aggregators). These transformations are accompanied by a reconfiguration of the systems of actors and governance. By focusing on energy in the building sector of cities in the North and South through a combination of social and human sciences and urban engineering approaches, the objective of the interdisciplinary INTENS project is to understand how energy interface functions (FIE - Fonctions d’Interface Énergétique) and urban territories co-evolve, and how these transformations contribute to the shaping of multiple energy transition paths.

Expected results
The products or deliverables of this research should testify to the capacity of the INTENS project to meet the demand for international visibility and interdisciplinarity. Several possibilities have been discussed: producing a collective book (e.g. published by Labex Urban Futures), or a special issue of a journal (e.g. Energy Policy); creating a summer doctoral course (e.g. ERASMUS Plus), or a master's degree in energy (e.g. "Energy and Society" at the University of Durham, or a master’s degree in "Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Energy of Tomorrow" at the University of Paris-Diderot; submit an application to a European call for proposals of the H2020 type (with European partners); creating a European doctoral course, which could be in continuity with the cycle of doctoral seminars that the "City and Energy" GT had already carried out in 2019 (3 thematic sessions, 6 working papers in the process of being published, as well as dissertation summaries).

The existence of health inequalities is based on differences in health status and health care consumption between individuals. The principle of horizontal equity recognises equal treatment for equal need of care. If this is not the case, it is necessary to examine the factors that explain these differences. In particular, territorial inequalities may result from differences in health status, social categories, preferences and risk behaviour. They can also be explained by an unequal distribution of healthcare provision. In the latter case, the question of the efficiency of the allocation of health resources arises. The aim of this thesis is therefore to analyse the factors behind the territorial disparities in the use of healthcare and preventive measures observed in a specific population (MGEN policyholders). It will involve mobilising medico-administrative data that will make it possible to monitor the consumption of care by insured persons over several years. These data will make it possible to determine the role of individual factors (age, marital status, monthly income, CMU-C, ALD, level of coverage) and contextual factors (socio-economic level of residence, supply of healthcare) when using a screening procedure and consulting a specialist using multilevel models. Spatial econometrics will be used to study the geographical relationships that may exist between areas of residence. Finally, it will be possible to evaluate the impact of the implementation of organised cervical cancer screening on the inequalities observed.

Valorisations
Articles
Konopka AM, Barnay T, Billaudeau N, Sevilla-Dedieu C (2019). Les déterminants du recours au
dépistage du cancer du col de l’utérus : une analyse départementale. Economie & Prévision, La
Documentation Française ; 0(216) : 43-63.

Oral Communications
Konopka AM, Barnay T, Sevilla-Dedieu C (2020). Substitution of ambulatory care by emergency
care in Health Professional Shortage Areas in France. European Health Economics Association
(EuHEA) 2020 conference, Virtual 9 juillet.

Konopka AM, Barnay T, Billaudeau N, Sevilla-Dedieu C (2019). Spatial determinants of cervical cancer
screening in France. 6th European Health Economics Association (EuHEA) PhD Student-Supervisor
and Early Career Researcher Conference. Porto, Portugal, 4-6 septembre.

Konopka AM, Barnay T, Billaudeau N, Sevilla-Dedieu C (2019). Geographical determinants of cervical
cancer screening in France. The Health Economists’ Study Group (HESG) Summer 2019 meeting,
University of East Anglia. Norwich, Angleterre, 3-5 juillet.

Konopka AM, Billaudeau N, Barnay T, Sevilla-Dedieu C (2018). Comment expliquer les inégalités
territoriales de recours au cancer du col de l’utérus ? 40èmes Journées des Économistes de la Santé
Français (JESF). Paris, France, 6-7 décembre.

Konopka AM, Billaudeau N, Barnay T, Sevilla-Dedieu C (2018). Comment réduire les inégalités
territoriales de recours au cancer du col de l’utérus ? 15ème Conférence annuelle Travail, Emploi et
Politiques Publiques -TEPP- « Évaluation des Politiques Publiques ». Créteil, France, 26-27 novembre.

Other articles
Konopka AM, Sevilla-Dedieu C, Barnay T (2020). Comment mieux dépister le cancer du col de l’utérus? The Conversation, 11 juin. https://theconversation.com/comment-mieux-depister-le-cancer-du-colde-luterus-139005

In post-socialist Central Asia, international mobilities directed mainly towards Russia have intensified considerably since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991. These migratory circulations sometimes come with the death of migrants. The REFPoM project is interested in the questions raised by the death of migrants in Russia and Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mongolia). It proposes to explore a region little researched by French anthropology and to analyse a phenomenon never before studied in the region, the "deceased at a distance", through an interdisciplinary approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The new territorialities of the deceased during migration testify to unprecedented circulation in the region in terms of their intensity and form, in a postcolonial context marked by inequalities between Russians and Central Asians. Moreover, they incite societies to innovate and to think of new ritual and economic practices to face them. This project aims to analyse them along two lines of study.

(a) Reterritorializing the dead. Symbolic, ritual and economic imperatives

The purpose of this research is to analyse the social, symbolic, ritual and economic modalities of the reterritorialisation of those deceased in mobility which, in the majority of cases, include the repatriation of their bodies. The aim will be to grasp what funerary ideology, transnational social and ritual practices and family relations underpin these mobilities. Deaths raise questions about the choice of burial place, the modalities of ritual performance and the financial costs that these deaths represent, for which the diversity of the populations (Tajik, Uzbek, Mongolian, etc.) and religions (Islam, Buddhism, etc.) that will be studied by the project's participants must be taken into account. Both in Central Asia and in Russia, institutional, political and economic constraints contribute to the creation by migrants and their families of social, ritual and economic adjustment practices. The analysis of the deaths of Central Asian migrants in Russia will thus allow us to grasp the issues raised by the social, symbolic, ritual and economic practices of reterritorialisation to which they give rise. It will thus contribute to research on deterritorialised dead people (Delaplace 2009).

(b) Funerary rituals, memory construction and political resistance

This line of research takes an interest in memory construction and the political dimension of these transnational ritual practices. One of the original features of the REFPoM project lies in its political approach of the phenomenon: the idea is to approach the ritual as the site of micro-politics, which makes it possible to grasp, beyond the symbolic and familial transformations, the way in which migrations and current political processes affect the relations of populations to their institutions. Here, the notions of 'tactics' (Certeau & Giard 2010) and 'infra-politics' (Scott 2006) will serve as a theoretical starting point for analysing the relationships between social groups (migrants, their families, etc.) and the institutions that govern them. By understanding transnational rituals as a more or less visible or conscious ‘arena of contestation’ (Gardner & Grillo 2002), this project will make visible political relations between communities and the state, relations that are not embodied in institutions but rather in practices - in this case funerary - that are most often aimed at circumventing them. The research team will analyse the role and dynamics of the funeral economy in the broadest sense in order to grasp the practices of mutual aid in migration, the management of death in a context of mobility and, more broadly, the dynamics underlying the relationship between society and politics in a post-socialist context.

CERTEAU Michel de & GIARD Luce, 2010, Arts de faire, Nouvelle éd., Paris, Gallimard (coll. « L’invention du quotidien »), 349 p.
DELAPLACE Grégory, 2009, L’invention des morts, Sépultures, fantômes et photographies en Mongolie contemporaine., Paris, Centre d’Études Mongoles et Sibériennes (EPHE) (coll. « Nord-Asie »), vol.1, 322 p.
GARDNER Katy, 2002, « Death of a migrant: transnational death rituals and gender among British Sylhetis », Global Networks, 1 juillet 2002, vol. 2, no 3, p. 191‑204.
SCOTT James C., 2006, « Infra-politique des groupes subalternes », Vacarme, 1990 2006, no 36, p. 25‑29.

The international mobility of highly skilled workers has become an essential element of globalisation. Since the end of the 20th century, developed countries have been engaged in a fierce competition to "attract the best talent".  The United States is the most advanced country in this competition, and Europeans occupy an important place among the ‘brains’ who come to work there.

We show that Europeans working in the United States, especially the British and the French, are at the top of the hierarchy of American companies, laboratories and universities. The very high salaries, and the highly rigorous selection of these European immigrants through the work visa system, combine to attract these highly skilled workers and thus provide the American economy with the specialists and experts it needs. The concentration of British and French immigrants in the high-tech sectors reveals the difficulties of their countries of origin in providing them with job opportunities commensurate with their qualifications.

This research uses the ACS (American Community Survey) database. This database is an annual survey of the 1% of the population residing in the United States. It allows for the extraction of a sufficient number of French, German, Italian and British citizens to conduct a detailed statistical and econometric analysis of their place in the American labour market.

Valorisation: This research resulted in a first publication for the general public in March 2021: "Les États-Unis, une économie numérique attractive pour les Européens les plus qualifiés?" - "The United States, an attractive digital economy for the most qualified Europeans?" (https://ceet.cnam.fr/publications) and will be followed by several publications in academic journals.

"In March 2018, the Ministry of Territorial Cohesion announced the launch of a national "Action cœur de ville" (‘Heart of the city action’) plan aimed at revitalising the city centres of medium-sized towns. This plan illustrates one of the key facts of the spatial organisation of cities since the 20th century: the phenomenon of decentralisation. In many developed countries, jobs, households and shops are moving from the city centre to the periphery (Duranton & Puga, 2015).

With regard to shops in particular, Procos, the specialised trade federation, highlights the desertification of town centres observed at a national level: according to Procos, commercial vacancy has now reached 7.1% of the commercial buildings in town centres compared with 6.3% in 2001. On the other hand, shopping centres are doing better, with less empty space (4.9% now).

Studying this change is important not only because of its quantitative importance, but also because in the French case this "decentralisation" of economic activity seems to be particularly significant for small towns. In fact, according to the Procos study cited above, only the very major cities (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, etc.) have seen their commercial vacancy fall over the last ten years (6% compared with 7.7%). In the economic literature, the phenomenon of decentralisation has been approached in different ways.

Firstly, from a theoretical point of view, two approaches have been used to study the determinants of land use in an urban context. The first one considers a monocentric city and develops a comparative statics analysis to evaluate the effect of a change of some parameters on the structure of the city. The Alonso-Mills-Muth model shows that the size of the city is sensitive to the cost of transport: a decrease in the cost of transport leads to a spread of the city. The second approach considers the possibility of a polycentric city where the location of firms and households is not known a priori but results from trade-offs generated by agglomeration economies or diseconomies. However, these canonical theoretical models do not explicitly consider the presence of shops, which are both a source of amenities and jobs. Yet the dynamics of the location of shops can play an important role in determining spatial equilibria. Indeed, Couture et al (2018) show that in the 100 largest American cities, commuting to work represented less than a quarter of trips made by private vehicles in 2008, i.e. as much as trips to shops. In this respect, the location of shops seems to play a decisive role in spatial equilibria, a role which has only been partially analysed up to now by the theoretical literature in urban economics (Takahashi, 2014). Taking into account agglomeration economies modifies the trade-offs that determine land use. The study of agglomeration economies in an urban economy model is particularly important in view of the growing number of empirical studies illustrating the importance and magnitude of agglomeration economies (Duranton and Puga 2015). Although these agglomeration economies have been modelled in the context of work in geographical economics (Behrens & Robert-Nicoud, 2015; Combes & Gobillon, 2015), work in an urban setting and explicitly integrating the floor space of commercial activities is rare.

This project therefore aims initially to fill this gap, and in particular to study the mutations in land use between commercial and residential real estate, and to explain the multiplication of the existence of secondary centres.

The objective of this project is also to shed empirical light on the phenomenon of decentralisation in France, with a particular focus on the commercial aspect of secondary centres, in order to understand the determinants of the existence of these centres and their possible specificities, particularly in terms of interactions with residential property.

As part of the climate and energy package put in place by the European Council in 2007, the European Commission has made changes to the regulations on state aid for the environment and energy in order to achieve the objectives set for 2020. In 2012, the European Commission adopted new guidelines allowing states to grant aid to energy-intensive sectors. The authorisations for these forms of aid have been reaffirmed in the new guidelines on the environment and energy of 2014. In this context, a state aid scheme to reduce the rate of domestic tax on final consumption of electricity was authorised in France in 2016 by the European Commission. The rate reductions apply to firms in the guided passenger or freight transport sector as well as to firms with electro-intensive or hyper-electro-intensive industrial installations.

The analysis in this paper will focus on the effectiveness of domestic tax reductions on final electricity consumption. The stated objective of these aids is to preserve the competitiveness of firms experiencing a sharp rise in their costs (notably linked to the increase in the tax rate on 1^st January 2016 in France) and to discourage them from relocating their activity to regions of the world where environmental regulations are more flexible. We would therefore like to study their impact on the competitiveness of firms and on the production sites. We would also like to complete the study by looking at potential protectionist effects through an analysis of the beneficiaries' sales and exports.

Two methods are envisaged to carry out this study. First, we would like to implement regressions with instrumental variables in order to analyse the impact of aid on beneficiaries while dealing with the potential endogeneity linked to the fact that firms' sales/exports/market share may influence in turn the Commission's choice to grant state aid or not. We would also like to set up discontinuity regressions. Indeed, the definitions of electro-intensive and hyper-electro-intensive industrial installations are based on thresholds concerning the share of value added devoted to the payment of the domestic tax on the final consumption of electricity (TICFE - Taxe Intérieure sur la Consommation Finale d'Électricité) and the electricity consumption of the installation. It is therefore possible to study the differences in performance, sales and competitiveness between beneficiaries and firms that do not receive them but that are very close to the thresholds for receiving them.