You can find here my working papers :

 

This paper investigates the impact of urban form on households’ fuel consumption and car emissions in France. We analyze more particularly three features of cities commonly referred to as the ‘3 D’s’ (Cervero & Kockelman 1997): Density, Design and an innovative measure of Diver-sity. Individual data allow us to circumvent sorting, as some households may live in a location consonant to their socioeconomic characteristics or travel predispositions, while instrumental variables help control for other endogeneity issues. The results suggest that, by choosing to live at the fringe of a metropolitan area instead of its city-center, our sample mean-household would bear an extra-consumption of approximatively six fuel tanks per year. More generally, doubling residential Density would result in an annual saving of approximatively two tanks per house-hold, a gain that would be much larger if compaction were coupled with better Design (stronger jobs centralization, improved rail-routes or buses transiting to job centers and reduced pressure for road construction), and more Diversity (continuous morphology of the built-up environment). Another important finding is that the relationship between metropolitan population and car emissions is bell-shaped in France, contrary to the US, which suggests that small cities do compensate lack of Density by either a better Design or more Diversity.

We study the welfare implications of public good agglomeration externalities in an economic geography framework. We first present new empirical evidence on scale economies in the consumption of local public goods using administrative panel data on French cities. We estimate strong agglomeration gains with an elasticity between 0.46 and 0.56. We then characterize the optimal spatial transfers achieving efficient population distribution in a spatial equilibrium model with endogenous public goods where workers have unobserved location preferences. In standard applications of our framework, we show that the government can improve upon the laissez-faire only when preference heterogeneity is weak enough. When heterogeneity is strong enough, place-based transfers unambiguously create winners and losers. Finally, we argue that the interplay between agglomeration forces and location preferences may justify place-specific transfers on horizontal or categorical equity grounds. We empirically investigate the relevance of these equity concerns in France by investigating the structure of the welfare weights rationalizing observed situations.  Ceteris paribus, the underlying social welfare function compensates low-density places.

It is well known that unemployment is very unevenly distributed across places. However,recent literature suggests that job accessibility may not have such important effects as previously expected on aggregated unemployment in local labor markets. To test empirically the spatial mismatch hypothesis, this paper uses the most important LRT building program ofthe last two decades alongside a new individual unemployed database to assess the effects of opening of a new transport option on the labour market in very deprived areas. We find no evidence of any improvement to the situation of the unemployed living in those areas, even if other outcomes indicate a positive and strong hedonic effect on the treated neighborhoods accessibility.

 

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