Antoine JACQUET will defend his thesis on Tuesday September 26th, at 3pm, auditorium 3 and hybrid format
"Essays in the economics of culture"
Supervisor: Paul SEABRIGHT
To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat Christelle Fotso Tatchum
Memberships are:
- M. Paul Seabright : Professeur d'Economie, Université Toulouse Capitole, Supervisor
- Mme Emmanuelle Auriol : Professeure d'Economie, Université Toulouse Capitole, Examinator
- M. Augustin Tapsoba : Assistant Professeur, Université Toulouse Capitole, Examinator
- Mme Sriya Iyer : Professeure d'Economie, Université de Cambridge, Advisor
- M. Thierry Verdier : Professeur d'Economie, PSE-Ecole d’Economie, Advisor
- M. Alfred Galichon : Professeur d'Economie, New-York University Paris, Examinator
Abstract:
Culture, human capital, and marital homogamy in France What economic sacrifices are people willing to make to transmit their culture? Using data on religious affiliation in France, I study the intergenerational transmission of religion and how it interacts with children’s educational outcomes. A reduced-form analysis suggests that mothers contribute to religious transmission more than fathers; religious minorities more than majorities; and lower-educated parents more than higher-educated ones. A mechanism that can explain these patterns is that higher-educated parents have a higher opportunity cost of transmitting their religion to their children. I investigate this mechanism through a structural model, in which parents endogenously decide their time investments in their child’s culture on the one hand, and in their formal education on the other hand. The analysis suggests that heterogeneities in transmission patterns are driven primarily by heterogeneities in preferences for religious transmission across genders and religious groups, rather than by differences in parents’ education. Furthermore, religious minorities pay a higher price for religious transmission in terms of their children’s educational outcomes. For instance, by measuring this cost in terms of the probability that the child will obtain a college education, Muslim parents pay a cost between 8 and 13 times greater than that for Christians. Veiling and Economic Integration of Muslim Women in France (with Sébastien Montpetit) The economic implications of policies limiting the wearing of the Islamic veil for Muslim women have largely been overlooked in many Western countries. This paper investigates the relationship between veiling behavior and economic participation using the largest sample of Muslim women in France. Firstly, we present new descriptive evidence about Muslim women in France, demonstrating a significant negative relationship between veiling and economic participation. Secondly, to disentangle the various motivations behind the joint decision to veil and to be economically active, we develop and estimate a discrete-choice model of veiling and labor force participation. Our findings indicate that veiled women are less economically active not only due to religious preferences but also because veiling substantially reduces their economic opportunities. Additionally, our results emphasize the significance of personal religious motives in the decision to veil, rather than community-based religious pressure. Consequently, our findings call into question the rhetoric used to justify policies that restrict the wearing of religious symbols in France. Are marriage markets segmented? Are marriage markets segmented? In traditional matching models with transferable utility, marital assortativity is fully rationalized by differences in the surplus produced by each potential match. This model feature necessarily leads to overestimating the role of spouses’ preferences in marital assortativity, at the expense of other explanations. In this paper, I study another mechanism behind marital assortativity which remains underexplored in the literature: the segmentation of marriage markets along spouses’ traits. I extend the Choo– Siow model to account for market segmentation: individuals are assigned to submarkets with probabilities which depend on their gender and matching trait. Segmentation thus provides a new explanation for spousal assortativity, which is accompanied by a new division of the surplus between spouses compared to the Choo–Siow model. I study this framework using matching patterns on education in France. In order to identify the role of segmentation versus surplus in assortativity, I use exogenous variation in the segmentation of the marriage market provided by the termination of mandatory military service in France in 1996.
