The Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), created in 1992 and directed by Professor Brigid Laffan, aims to develop inter-disciplinary and comparative research and to promote work on the major issues facing the process of integration and European society. The Centre is home to a large post-doctoral programme and hosts major research programmes and projects, and a range of working groups and ad hoc initiatives. The research agenda is organised around a set of core themes and is continuously evolving, reflecting the changing agenda of European integration and the expanding membership of the European Union.

La forte croissance des exportations chinoises au cours des deux dernières décennies a suscité un vif débat quantà son impact sur l'emploi dans le manufacturier et sur les inégalités salariales. Cet articleétudie l'effet de la concurrence des importations chinoises sur la structure des salaires et de l'emploi local en France. Il porte une attention particulière aux effets de débordements au-delà du secteur manufacturier et aux inégalités des salaires. L'emploi local est négativement affecté au sein du secteur manufacturier et au-delà. Les coefficients estimés supposent que chaque emploi détruit dans le secteur manufacturier induit la destruction d'environ 1,5 emplois supplémentaires au niveau local. Ces effets de "multiplicateur local" sont cependant beaucoup plus modestes lorsqu'ils sont exprimés en termes d'heures travaillées ou de revenu du travail. La concurrence chinoise est associéeà une polarisation de la structure des emplois dans le secteur manufacturier. La distribution des salaires est négativement affectée de manière uniforme dans le secteur manufacturier alors qu'en dehors de ce secteur l'effet négatif est concentré sur le milieu de la distribution. Si en moyenne les inégalités salariales (mesurées par la ratio du 85è me percentile sur le 15è me percentile) ne sont pas affectées, elles ont augmenté en réaction au choc induit par les importations chinoises dans les zones où le salaire minimum n'est que faiblement contraignant.

The rapid rise of Chinese exports over the past two decades has raised concerns about manufacturing jobs and wage inequality in high‐income countries. spillovers beyond the manufacturing sector are an important issue given the large size of the nontraded sector in modern economies as well as the imperfect spatial mobility of households. In this paper, I estimate the impact of Chinese import competition onto the structure of employment and wages of local labor markets in France, with an emphasis on spillovers effects beyond manufacturing and the degree of local wage inequality. Local employment and total labor income in both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing are negatively affected by rising exposure to imports. Import competition from China polarized the local structure of employment in the manufacturing sector. The wage distribution is uniformly negatively affected in manufacturing while the nontraded sector experiences wage polarization, i.e., a rise in upper‐tail inequality and a decline in bottom‐tail inequality. While overall wage inequality is on average not affected, I show that it increased in response to trade shocks in areas where the minimum wage is only weakly binding.

In this paper, we document the presence of "technology-induced" trade in France between 1997 and 2007 and assess its impact on consumer welfare. We use the staggered roll-out of broadband internet to estimate its causal effect on the importing behavior of affected firms. Using an event-study design, we find that broadband expansion increases firm-level imports by around 25%. We further find that the "sub-extensive" margin (number of products and sourcing countries per firm) is the main channel of adjustment and that the effect is larger for capital goods. Finally, we develop a model where firms optimize over their import strategy and which yields a sufficient statistics formula for the quantification of the effects of broadband on consumer welfare. Interpreted within this model, our reduced-form estimates imply that broadband internet reduced the consumer price index by 1.7% and that the import-channel, i.e. the enhanced access to foreign goods that is allowed by broadband, accounts for a quarter of that effect.

Do workers gain from lower business taxes, and why? We estimate how a large French corporate income tax credit is passed on to wages and explore the firm-and employee-level underlying mechanisms. The amount of tax credit firms get depends on their payroll share of workers paid less than a wage threshold. Exposure to the policy thus varies both across workers depending on their wage and across firms depending on their wage structure. Using exhaustive employeremployee data, we find that half of the surplus generated by the reform falls onto workers. Wage gains load on incumbents in high-skill occupations. The wage earnings of low-skill workers -nearly all individually eligible -do not change. This heterogeneous wage incidence is unlikely to be driven by scale effects or skill complementarities. We find that the groups of workers benefiting from wage gains are also more likely to continue working for the same firm. Further, we show that firms do not change their wage-setting behavior in response to the individual eligibility status of workers as there is no bunching in the distribution of entrants' wages. Overall, our results suggest that the wage incidence of firm taxation operates collectively through rent-sharing and benefits workers most costly to replace.