Séminaires de recherche

Mardi | 2011-12-15
B103

Christelle GARROUSTE – Massimo LOI

In a context of intensive and global economic competition, European countries are growingly concerned with the consequences of increasing numbers of young people temporarily or permanently prevented from entering the job market and the difficulties faced by college and university graduates to find adequate employment. This study is concerned with analyzing the speed of transition of students to permanent employment as a proxy of professional stability, and by identifying possible discriminatory effects in selected countries. The research questions are addressed with a Cox survival model and a continuous-time Markov chain model where each individual can transit non-sequentially between the following Markov states: (1) education; (2) inactivity; (3) unemployment; (4) fixed-term/temporary employment; and (5) permanent employment (the 5th state being a non-absorbing steady state).The model is tested using the longitudinal ECHP data in thirteen EU member countries, over the period 1994-2001, controlling for individual and household characteristics and labour market characteristics (e.g., youth employment rate and share of temporary contracts). Overall, we find that the Mediterranean countries are the ones where the transition is the most hazardous both in terms of length and number of steps, but that in other countries, the speed of convergence is not necessarily correlated to the number of spells at intermediate states. Moreover, we find that the gender discrimination that affected most of the countries at the beginning of the 1990s, faded away by the end of the decade, replaced by a positive discrimination in favour of the graduates from vocationally oriented programmes.

Mercredi | 2011-12-14
B103

Oumou GUISSE

L’objectif de cet article est d’étudier la nature de la relation entre endettement extérieur et activité économique. L’étude se fait sur un panel constitué des pays membres de l’Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine (à l’exception de la Guinée Bissau) sur une période allant de 1970 à 2009. La méthodologie utilisée, celle développée par Hansen (1999), a permis d’étudier et d’estimer le niveau d’endettement soutenable maximal qui pourrait être favorable à la croissance économique.Ce choix de travail se justifie par le fait que la politique budgétaire n’ad’effets keynésiens que si la dette publique est en deçà d’un certain seuil (Tanimoune & Combes) d’où l’intérêt d’étudier le taux d’endettement optimal. La modélisation aboutit à un seuil optimal d’endettement de 60%, celui-ci est le niveau à partir duquel l’endettement devient un facteur négatif de la croissance. Le modèle fait apparaître deux régimes. Si le niveau de la dette est en-deça du seuil, l’endettement supplémentaire n’a pas d’effets directs sur la croissance et au-dessus des 60% du PIB, l’endettement extérieur aura un effet négatif sur l’Activité Economique des pays de l’Union Economique et Monétaire Ouest Africaine, le niveau de la dette devient alors un frein à l’expansion. L’impact de la dette sur la croissance dépend donc du poids de l’endettement par rapport au PIB. L’analyse nous a permis également d’identifier certaines variables, retenues a priori, susceptibles d’influencer la croissance au sein de l’UEMOA.

Mardi | 2011-12-13
B103

Mazen KEBEWAR

L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser l’impact de la structure du capital sur la profitabilité. Cet impact peut être expliqué par trois théories essentielles: la théorie du signal, l’influence de la fiscalité et la théorie de l’agence. Nous montrons, à partir d’un échantillon de 9136 entreprises réparties sur sept secteurs prises sur la période 1999-2006, à l’aide d’une étude sur panel dynamique en utilisant la méthode des moments généralisée (GMM), qu’il y a une hétérogénéité des comportements entre les secteurs en ce qui concerne l’effet de la structure du capital sur la profitabilité. L’analyse empirique a permis de distinguer trois groupes différents de secteurs: pour le premier groupe (l’industrie, l’énergie et le service), la structure du capital n’a aucune incidence sur la profitabilité. Le deuxième groupe ne contient que le secteur de transport, c’est le groupe où l’endettement affecte négativement la profitabilité de manière linéaire. Le dernier groupe (l’agro alimentation, la construction et le commerce) se caractérise par la présence d’un effet négatif de façon linéaire et non linéaire.

Mardi | 2011-12-06
B103

Comlanvi Jude EGGOH – Muhammad KHAN

Using a large panel data of both developed and developing economies and based on the PSTR and dynamic GMM techniques, this paper highlights two aspects of the inflation-growth relationship. First, it analyzes non-linearity and offersseveral thresholds for the global sample as well as for different income specific sub-samples. Second, it identifies some indirect channels effectualfor inflation-growth non-linearity. Our empirical results substantiate both views and validate the fact that inflation-growth non-linearity is sensitive to financial development, investment ratio, trade openness and government expenditures. Finally, for different country groups, the indirect channels show some marked differences in this non-linear relationship.

Mercredi | 2011-11-30
B103

Cristina BADARAU-SEMENESCU – Alexandra POPESCU

Mercredi | 2011-11-23
B103

Syed Muhammad Noaman Ahmed SHAH

According to theoretical models of valuing risky corporate securities, risk of default is primary component in the overall yield spread. However, sizable empirical literature considers it otherwise by giving more importance to non-default risk factors. Current study empirically attempts to provide answer to this question by presuming that problem lies in the empirical measurement technique. By using post-hoc estimator approach of Lubotsky & Wittenberg 2006, we construct an efficient indicator for risk of default, by using sample of 252 non-financial US corporate data. On average, our results manifest significantly that potential problem lies in the ad-hoc measurement methods used in existing empirical literature.

Mardi | 2011-11-08
B103

Florent BRESSON – Jean-Yves DUCLOS

The paper deals with poverty orderings when the value of multidimensional attributes can be compared on a same scale, such as with income of different types or from different members of the same household. The dominance criteria extend the power of earlier multidimensional dominance tests (see Duclos et al. 2006) by making (reasonable) assumptions on the relative marginal contributions of each dimensional attribute to poverty. The paper focuses on an important special case of this, that is comparisons of poverty over time. In contrast to earlier work on intertemporal poverty comparisons, this paper proposes procedures to check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robust to wide classes of aggregation procedures and to broad areas of intertemporal poverty frontiers

Mardi | 2011-10-25
B103

Thierry BAUDASSE – Rémi BAZILLIER – Cristina BOBOC-TRANDAS

This paper aims at providing empirical evidences concerning the linkages betweengender equality and emigration. To analyze such linkages, two theoreticalhypothesis can be made. The rst one is that gender discrimination in origincountries can be a push factor for women. Therefore an improvement of genderequality would decrease the flow of female migrants. The second one is that gender discrimination may create a gender bias » in the selection of migrants within a household or a community. An improvement of gender equality would then increase female migration. We build several original indexes of gender equality, using principal component analysis. Our empirical results show that the push factor hypothesis is clearly rejected. All things being equal, improving gender equality at the workplace is positively correlated with the migration of women (especially the high-skilled). We observe the opposite effect for low-skilled men. This result is robust to several specification and several measurement of gender equality.

Mardi | 2011-10-19
C003

Manuel RUIZ-MARIN

We propose the first statistical test to determine, given a spatial process, if the spatial structure is generated by a deterministic, rather than by a stochastic, process. The conditions under which the test can be applied are really weak. The advantages of the presented methods are simplicity, invariance respect to monotonic transformations and the applicability of the test regardless the discrete or continuous nature of the data generating process. We conduct several simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our test on well-known spatial processes.

Mercredi | 2011-10-12

William TELKES

Nowadays, many biotechnology companies are the source of scientific and technological breakthroughs and this is especially true in the pharmaceutical industry. However, developing such innovations is particularly risky. As these innovative ventures evolve in a context of high uncertainty and as their financial needs are quite large, especially when it comes to fund clinical tests, many of them have great difficulties in finding potential funding sources. Many traditional funding sources, such as banks, are unwilling to take such risks and so they avoid participating in the financing of such companies. Unlike traditional sources of funding, venture capitalists are willing to take high risks as their ultimate goal is to make huge financial gains. Among venture capitalists funding innovative biotechnology companies, we distinguish between independent venture capitalists (IVC) and corporate venture capitalists (CVC). Both types of venture capital are similar in some respect, but there are disparities on several dimensions. Prior research suggests that both venture capitalists have complementary capabilities. In general, venture capitalists mainly privilege investments in syndicated deals, because syndication is considered as an effective way to mitigate risk and uncertainty. Moreover, as IVCs and CVCs have complementary unique resources, syndication gives them the opportunity to join forces. Based on a signaling approach, this paper aims to determine when syndication occurs, i.e. when IVCs and CVCs put together their complementary knowledge and resources. The paper shows that according to the a priori signals received ex ante on the quality of the project and the expertise level of each venture capitalist, syndication is more or less likely. When syndication occurs, it leads to a better assessment of investment opportunities and creates value in earnings compared to standalone and fixed-yield investments.