Public Outreach

What are the determinants of mobility in the labour market? Are some professions more mobile than others? Researchers Benoît Schmutz, Modibo Sidibé and Élie Vidal-Naquet reveal ways of influencing worker mobility in order to vitalise the labour market.

Bankruptcy, rising prices, epidemics... In economics, there are many risks. Is insurance really the only tool available to deal with them? According to economists Renaud Bourlès, Yann Bramoullé and Eduardo Perez-Richet, altruism also plays a key role. The ties that bind us to each other form a large network of mutual aid in the event of a major setback.

Do fairness and fasting go together ? During Ramadan, judges of the Muslim faith pronounce 40 % more acquittals than usual. This excess of clemency has just been revealed by an analysis of 380,000 judicial cases handled by 8,500 magistrates in the Indian sub-continent by economists Sultan Mehmood, Avner Seror and Daniel L. Chen.

Falling ill as a self-employed person or as a freelancer means facing a dilemma. Do you react as the company owner and focus on the financial continuity of your business, or do you react as an employee and take time off to recover? An international and multidisciplinary team of researchers shows that self-employed workers most often prefer the first option.

Wealthy ethnic minorities have a double advantage for autocracies: they are important for the economy and make perfect scapegoats for popular anger. This is a useful phenomenon for deflecting resentment against local authorities and delaying regime change.

Between age, social status, health, and education, we are not all equal when it comes to our income! However, even as equality becomes a major focus of study, most research concentrates on income disparities within homogeneous populations. In 2021, the economists Mathieu Faure and Nicolas Gravel developed a new way to measure inequality by looking at the differences between individuals. This small revolution can play a large role in the fight against the many faces of inequality.

Following the Covid-19 epidemic, the European economy has once more been shaken by the arrival of war in Ukraine. How can these ‘asymmetric’ shocks, affecting member states in different ways, be managed? Economists Gilles Dufrénot, Jean-Baptiste Gossé et Caroline Clerc argue the case for financial integration. Financial markets can reduce the adverse effects of financial crises by sharing the risk across European economies.

While the reform of pensions and the reform of the ecological transition are being approached by the French government as two distinct issues, they could be more linked than it might seem. Economists Armel Ngami and Thomas Seegmuller look at the effect of a pay-as-you-go pension system, taking into account the evolution of capital and pollution, as well as the effectiveness of health and environmental policies.

What do the Sahara Desert and Paris’ 16th arrondissement have in common? Both are located above a somewhat unusual water table: when you dig a hole in it, the water gushes out all on its own! The economists Hubert Stahn and Agnes Tomini examine this astonishing geological phenomenon in which the number of open wells does not impact the quantity of water in the water table, but rather the pressure that compresses its volume.

To what point does visiting a natural habitat modify the importance we give it? Does the value we give a place increase if, with each visit, we have a better academic and personal understanding of it? To respond to these questions, the researchers M. Maki Sy, H. Rey-Valette, C. Figuières, M. Simier, and R. de Wit examined the Palavas lagoons complex near Montpellier, France. The result of their study is undeniable: in most cases, an individual’s familiarity with a habitat changes his preferences. Scientific understanding also changes an individual’s preferences, but in a different way. Let’s discover how!