Hello. I'm Fabien Petit.

Abstract: Values capture what is important to an individual and can shape economic behaviors through attitudes and preferences. Yet, no attention has been paid to the fact that individuals hold a variety of values and that there may be costs when these are not consistent with each other. This paper examines how individuals reconcile their values, both over time and across different categories, when values are inter-dependent. I develop a model in which individuals adjust their values simultaneously when an experience occurs in their life, thus leading to spillover effects across values. Bringing the model to cohort data, I assess the impact of several life events—parenthood, sickness and unemployment—on values. The empirical results suggest that (i) values change over the lifecycle due to life events, (ii) values are linked to each other, and (iii) spillover effects do exist and are sizeable.

Abstract: The age structure of the population has received little attention as a determinant of the labor share. This paper argues that demographic dynamics in high-income countries affect the labor share in two different ways: directly through the labor supply and capital accumulation, but also indirectly through public policy. I use an OLG model in which a generational conflict arises because young and old individuals have different income sources and opposite objectives in terms of public policy. The youth face unemployment risk and use their political weight to raise the unemployment benefit, while the old favor health expenditures. This tension over the public budget allocation has consequences for wage bargaining and thus for the labor share. Numerical simulations for France and the United States indicate that the model can replicate the data and that boomers’ cohorts have driven the observed decline of the labor share.

Abstract: The increase in employment polarization observed in a number of high-income economies has coincided with a reduction in inter-generational mobility. This paper uses data for two British cohorts that entered the labour market at two points in time that differed considerably in terms of the structure of employment to re-examine the drivers of mobility. We differ from the existing literature in two aspects. First, we focus on employment categories rather than income or ‘class’, thus obtaining dynamics that can be understood in terms of changes in the structure of employment. Second, we argue that understanding inter-generational dynamics requires considering how individuals move from their entry jobs into other employment categories, i.e. understanding intra-generational employment changes. The data indicates that occupational changes over the individual’s career are an important source of mobility, with large shares of those in low-paying (respectively, middling) occupations moving into middling (resp. high-paying) ones. When we compare the two cohorts we find that these two sources of mobility have declined, as the younger cohorts displays a lower probability of moving from low-paying to middling jobs and a smaller share of young individuals in middling occupations, and hence with the potential to move upwards. Moreover, whatever the initial occupation, parental income has become more important, with those at the top (resp. bottom) of the parental-income distribution having a greater probability of experiencing an upgrading (resp. downgrading) of their occupation. That is, we observe a polarization of mobility.