Carla Ilardi*, Shadas Marc Sodji**

*This paper analyzes how public employment service agencies adapted to the Covid-19 crisis in France. This crisis constituted an unprecedented organizational shock, combining a sharp increase in the number of jobseekers followed and exceptional constraints, making the rapid development of remote support indispensable. Using administrative data from Pôle emploi between 2017 and 2024, I study the effect of agency overload on their capacity to maintain support activities : counseling, guidance, training and measures facilitating return to employment. While questioning the nature of the relationship between overload and performance : are the effects linear, or do we observe temporary adaptation mechanisms and "defensive productivity" under moderate overload ? The analysis compares heavily overloaded agencies to very lightly overloaded ones. It also identifies the most affected actions, the most resilient ones, and the differences in recovery time across action categories. The empirical strategy relies on difference-indifferences models, exploiting variations in overload intensity across agencies and the pre-crisis level of digitalization as a potential shock-absorbing mechanism.

**This paper examines how environmental quality affects fertility decisions and its joint implications for economic dynamics and pollution evolution. We develop an overlapping generations (OLG) model in which longevity, fertility, and economic growth are jointly endogenous, while incorporating healthdamaging pollution. The government finances, through labor income taxation, two types of public expenditures: public health spending and abatement policies, both of which contribute to increasing life expectancy and sustaining long-run economic growth. We show that the global dynamics of the model converge to a unique steady-state equilibrium. We then analyze the role of fiscal policy and find that a reallocation of public resources toward environmental protection at the expense of health expenditures produces contrasting effects depending on the relative magnitude of production-related pollution intensity versus the efficiency of abatement technologies. Indeed, in a highly polluting regime where abatement technologies are inefficient, such a reallocation traps the economy in a vicious circle characterized by low longevity, high fertility, low per capita capital, and high aggregate pollution. In contrast, in a transition regime where abatement technologies are efficient, environmental policy becomes a key driver of sustainable growth, characterized by a demographic transition (low fertility and high longevity) together with simultaneous improvements in economic performance and environmental quality. Finally, we show that the income tax acts as a catalyst for the demographic transition: it transforms an economy characterized by high fertility and low life expectancy into one with low fertility and high longevity. This mechanism is entirely mediated by the increase in longevity, distinguishing it from traditional channels studied in the economic literature, where taxation directly affects fertility through disposable income and the opportunity cost of having children.