Eve Caroli

New Technologies, Organisation and Age: Firm-Level Evidence

We investigate the relationships between new technologies, innovative workplace practices and the age structure of the workforce in a sample of French firms. We find evidence that the wage-bill share of older workers is lower in innovative firms and that the opposite holds for younger workers. This age bias affects both men and women. It is also evidenced within occupational groups. More detailed analysis of employment inflows and outflows shows that new technologies essentially affect older workers through reduced hiring opportunities. In contrast, organisational innovations mainly affect their probability of exit, which decreases much less than for younger workers following reorganisation. Copyright 2006 Royal Economic Society. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Innovative Work Practices, Information Technologies and Working Conditions: Evidence for France

We investigate the impact of new work practices and information and communication technologies (ICT) on working conditions in France. We use a unique French dataset providing information on individual workers for the year 1998. New work practices include the use of quality norms, job rotation, collective discussions on work organization, and work time flexibility. Working conditions are captured by occupational injuries as well as indicators of mental strain. We find that individuals working under the new practices face greater mental strain than individuals who do not. They also face a higher probability of work injuries, at least for benign ones. In contrast, our results suggest that ICT contribute to make the workplace more cooperative and to reduce occupational risks and injuries.

Working in family firms: less paid but more secure? Evidence from French matched employer-employee data

The authors study compensation packages in family-owned and nonfamily-owned firms. Using French matched employer-employee data, they first show that family firms pay on average lower wages. Part of this wage gap is attributable to low-wage workers sorting into family firms and high-wage workers sorting into nonfamily firms; however, they also find evidence that company wage policies differ according to ownership status, so that the same worker is paid differently under family and nonfamily firm ownership. In addition, family firms are characterized by lower job insecurity, as measured by lower dismissal rates. Family firms also appear to rely less on dismissals, and more on hiring reductions, than do nonfamily firms when they downsize. The authors show that compensating wage differentials account for a substantial part of the inverse relationship between the family/nonfamily gaps in wages and job security.

New Organizational Practices and Working Conditions. Evidence from France in the 1990's

We investigate the impact of innovative work practices on working conditions. We use a unique French dataset providing information on individual workers for year 1998. New work practices which play a key role in the success of the new economy, include job rotation and the use of quality norms. Working conditions are captured by occupational injuries as well as indicators of mental strain. Using Rubins causal model, we show that, even after controlling for employee and job characteristics and correcting for sample selection bias, workers involved in the new work practices still face working conditions that are significantly worse than those of non innovative workers.

Age Biased Technical and Organisational Change, Training and Employment Prospects of Older Workers

We analyse the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment prospects of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, we first estimate wage bill share equations for different age groups. As a second step, we estimate the impact of ICT, innovative work practices and training on employment flows by age group in the next period. Training appears to have a positive impact on the employability of older workers, but it offers limited prospects to dampen the age bias associated with new technologies and innovative work practices.

Risk aversion and rising wage inequality

We propose a model in which, as incomes grow, workers become less risk-averse and move from fixed-wage contracts to variable pay. This can explain the recent increase in wage dispersion between groups, within groups, and over the lifecycle.

Delivering Flexibility: Contrasting Patterns in the French and the UK Food Processing Industry

This article provides a comparative analysis of changes in numerical and functional labour flexibility in the French and the UK food processing industry. Based upon case study data, it explores the interaction between competitive pressures and institutional and regulatory structures and their impact on workplace practices. The findings indicate that, faced with a similar competitive environment, firms in both countries have sought to increase labour flexibility. However, the predominant forms of flexibility vary across the two countries, partly reflecting the characteristics of national labour market institutions. Numerical flexibility dominates in the UK, with high levels of paid overtime and temporary agency work. In contrast, French workplaces rely more on internal functional flexibility while also achieving numerical flexibility through seasonal variations in work schedules and a wide range of short-term employment contracts.

Stealing to Survive: Crime and Income Shocks in 19th Century France

Using local administrative data from 1826 to 1936, we document the evolution of crime rates in 19th century France and we estimate the impact of a negative income shock on crime. Our identification strategy exploits the phylloxera crisis. Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed about 40% of French vineyards. We use the geographical variation in the timing of this shock to identify its impact on property and violent crime rates, as well as minor offences. Our estimates suggest that the phylloxera crisis caused a substantial increase in property crime rates and a significant decrease in violent crimes.

Not in My Community: Social Pressure and the Geography of Dismissals

We investigate the impact of local social pressure on firms’ firing decisions. Using linked employer-employee data, we show that secondary establishments located further away from headquarters have higher dismissal rates than those located closer. The effect of distance on dismissals is stronger, the greater the visibility of the firm in the local community of its headquarters and the larger the degree of selfishness of that community. We show that these findings can be explained by the social pressure exerted by the communities where firms’ headquarters are located, which induces CEOs to refrain from dismissing at short distance from their headquarters.

Self-reported health and gender: The role of social norms

The role of social norms in accounting for the different attitudes of men and women with respect to health is still an open issue. In this research, we investigate the role of social norms associated with specific gender environments in the workplace in accounting for differences in health-reporting behaviours across men and women. Using the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey, we build a database containing 30,124 observations. We first replicate the standard result that women report worse health than men, whatever the health outcome we consider. We then proxy social norms by the gender structure of the workplace environment and study how the latter affects self-reported health for men and women separately. Our findings indicate that individuals in workplaces where women are a majority tend to report worse health than individuals employed in male-dominated work environments, be they men or women. These results are robust to controlling for a large array of working condition indicators, which allows us to rule out that the poorer health status reported by individuals working in female-dominated environments could be due to worse job quality. This evidence suggests that social norms associated with specific gender environments play an important role in explaining differences in health-reporting behaviours across gender, at least in the workplace.