Working Papers
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, CEBRIG Working Paper N°23-009, October 2023.[ Abstract ]Expert judgments may increase or decrease consumer welfare depending on experts’ ability to redirect consumers toward goods they enjoy. Leveraging the discontinuity created by the attribution of the Booker Prize, a leading literary award, we confirm that the prize attracts readers to consumption. We then investigate how it affects consumer surplus. We measure consumer ex post satisfaction from reading a book by the sentiment and the rating of the reviews posted on Amazon. We show that the Booker reduces satisfaction and that this negative effect is driven by a misalignment between the tastes of the jury and those of consumers. We quantify the associated loss in welfare by calibrating a structural model of demand. We find that the prize reduces consumer surplus by USD135,000 annually, meaning that a consumer buying a Booker Prize-winning book experiences a loss in surplus of 4% of the average price of a book.
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, CEBRIG Working Paper N°23-003, April 2023, revise and resubmit Public Choice.[ Abstract ]This paper studies the relationship between the size of a jurisdiction and how corrupt its citizens perceive officials to be. The relationship may a priori be driven by four distinct mechanisms: (i) larger communities have more officials, thereby making it more likely at least one official is corrupt; (ii) larger communities have a larger budget, thereby offering more opportunity to be corrupt; (iii) monitoring officials is costlier in larger communities; and (iv) the public is less likely to have contact with officials in larger communities, which raises citizen’s suspicion. First, using cross-country analysis, we establish that corruption is perceived as larger in countries with larger populations. We then test this stylized fact using French survey data on the perception of the municipal government corruption. We again observe that perceived corruption increases with population size. This result holds through a series of robustness checks and many confounding factors. Moreover, our results hold across two distinct periods and for another administrative unit, departments. Finally, we report suggestive evidence that the stylized fact is driven by mechanisms (i) and (ii), but not by (iii) and (iv).
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, IZA DP No. 15589, September 2022, revise and resubmit Economic Journal.[ Abstract ]We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential elections against far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Instrumenting rally attendance with rainfall while factoring in that some municipalities never host protests, we find that larger protests reduced the number of votes for Le Pen and abstention, while increasing the number of votes for the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac. We find that the effect spread out beyond the municipalities that hosted protests and worked through media exposure and framing. Using survey data, we show that protests reduced support for the policies advocated by Le Pen. Moreover, the positive effect on voting for Chirac resulted from right-wing voters switching from Le Pen to Chirac and left-wing voters not casting a blank ballot, implying that some voters voted expressively. Finally, we show that protests reduced the social desirability of voting for Le Pen.[ Media coverage: Der Tagesspiegel, MDR, La Libre, La Tribune, The Conversation, Sud Ouest, France 3 Régions, myScience ]
Published and Forthcoming Papers
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, Journal of Industrial Economics, no. 72 (March 2024): 49-80.[ Abstract ] [ Appendix ]Exploiting the award process, we implement a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of winning France’s main literary prize, the Goncourt. It increases sales, especially for books that sold fewer copies before the announcement, the number of reviews on Amazon, and the probability of them being negative. The effect is partly driven by an increase in word of mouth. Those findings are consistent with a model where the prize provides information on the existence of a book and acts as a quality signal and a coordination device but prompts consumers to read books that are far from their tastes.
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, forthcoming Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.[ Abstract ] [ Appendix ]Organizational dehumanization, a concept that has garnered increasing scholarly attention, still faces two significant limitations within the current literature. First, there is a lack of rigorously validated scales in the field. Second, the effects of organizational dehumanization on the family domain have been largely overlooked. In light of these gaps, we embarked on a comprehensive research project comprising five studies (NTotal = 2635) to address these limitations. Our primary objectives were twofold: (1) to develop and validate a concise five-item scale for measuring organizational dehumanization based on Caesens et al.’s (Eur. J. Work Org. Psychol., 26, 2017, 527-540) 11-item measure (Studies 1, 2 and 3) and (2) to investigate a novel spillover–crossover model of organizational dehumanization (Studies 4 and 5). Our results indicated that our proposed short scale has a good factorial structure and high reliability indices, correlates strongly with the 11-item full scale, is invariant over time and demonstrates evidence for convergent, discriminant and incremental validity. In addition, using data from both employees and their family members, we showed that organizational dehumanization contributes to an increase in work-to-family conflict among employees, as perceived by their family members. This, in turn, heightens relationship tension within their family members, ultimately leading to a decline in their relationship satisfaction. Theoretical and practical implications and avenues for future research are also discussed.
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, Current Psychology, no. 42 (September 2023): 22866–22880.[ Abstract ] [ Appendix ]The present research investigates whether employees felt more alienated from their work during the COVID-19 pandemic than before it, and examines the causes and consequences of this increase in work alienation. To do so, two longitudinal studies using data collected before (T1; October 2019 [Study 1] and November 2019 [Study 2]) and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (T2; May 2020 [Studies 1 and 2]) were conducted (i.e., repeated measures). Data of both studies were analyzed using unobserved effects panel data models. Results of Study 1 (N = 197) indicated that employees reported higher levels of work alienation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Going one step further, results of Study 2 (N = 295) showed that this higher feeling of work alienation may be explained by an increase in professional isolation and a decrease in meaningfulness of work induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Results also demonstrated that this increase in work alienation negatively affected employees’ job satisfaction, affective commitment, and turnover intentions. Findings are discussed and practical implications for managers are identified.[ Media coverage: Mind Help ]