Due to the information asymmetry between patients and physicians, prescribing decisions are made by physicians. To promote their drugs, pharmaceutical companies spend considerable amounts to physicians, either by funding their attendance to conferences, or through donations and gifts. The relationships between healthcare professionals and the pharmaceutical industry, and the influence of promotion on doctors' prescribing behavior, is therefore a major issue for the regulation of healthcare spending and the sustainability of our healthcare system. Indeed, laboratory promotion can be beneficial if it provides information to physicians, which then leads them to prescribe treatments associated with better health outcomes. But it can be costly and inefficient if these prescriptions only result from the moral contract which binds doctors to firms and leads them to prescribe treatments which are less effective and / or more costly. This project aims to analyze the role of the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and doctors on the prescription behavior of the latter. We mobilize a wide range of microeconomic analysis tools (microeconomic theory, mobilization of large administrative databases, laboratory testing and experimentation) in order to assess the impact of drug promotion on doctors' prescribing behaviors. in France. The project will answer to two important questions. First, we will analyze if physicians prescribe more drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies with which they have financial relations. We will also test whether this leads them to more expensive and/or less effective prescriptions than they would do without any financial relations. To answer these questions, we will use administrative, longitudinal and exhaustive data on physicians in France. More precisely, we will merge data from the “Transparence Santé” database to those of the national health insurance. Then, a testing with doctors will be implemented; this is the only possible way to analyze if these financial relations lead to less efficient prescriptions. In our second research question, we will analyze whether prescriptions result from better drug knowledge due to information provided by the pharmaceutical industry, or if they are motivated by financial incentives instead. We will develop a theoretical model whose predictions will be tested thanks to a lab experiment. This entire project will be carried out with a team with varied and complementary skills in microeconomics, as well as with public health doctors and a psychologist.

The purpose of this interdisciplinary project is to study the socio-demographic, economic, and political consequences of the World War II in France. To this end, we will use historical quantitative data, and methods from both political science and economics. Distinguishing short-term and long-term impacts, we focus on three dimensions of the World War II: a foreign occupation and internal violence, an international war of liberation, and, finally, elites’ behaviors and institutions changes. According to the literature studying conflict in other context, conflicts impact economic and human capital, social capital, trust in institution and interpersonal trust, legitimacy of politicians and elite, and gender inequalities. To empirically study these potential impacts in France after World War II, we exploit various sources of data, and we plan to collect data dealing with the intensity and the spatial disparity of the various dimensions of the War in France and relate them to various post-war measures. In addition to previous monographic and qualitative studies, the project will broaden our knowledge of the effects of World War II and provide new empirical materials for historical political economy. We will consider the second world war in France at various geographic level and period of time to gauge its impacts on inequality within and between areas. In addition to spatial and time variations, the project aims at studying inequalities as a whole, should they be inter-generational or gender-based.

France and Germany are two major countries of immigration in Europe. In 2010, foreign-born individuals represented 7.2% and 6.3% of their respective population (Brücker et al., 2013). Despite different economic situations with respect to inequality and unemployment, the recent increase in asylum demands and illegal immigration has raised a vivid debate on the strictness of immigration policies in both countries. The economic consequences of immigration, especially for native workers, are at the centre of this debate. In three scientific work-packages (WPs), this project will investigate the impact of immigrant workers on natives’ jobs and wages. We will go beyond the existing literature by investigating why the impact of immigrants varies across countries. We will devote particular attention to task allocation and production strategies (WP1) and to trade integration (WP2) to detect conditional labour market effects of immigration. We will also investigate the interplay between labour market effects and immigration policies (WP3). WP1 will focus on the demand side of the labour market. We will explore how immigration affects task allocation within and across firms. We will also investigate the link between foreign employment and firms’ production strategies (such as outsourcing). WP2 will investigate to what extent the impact of immigrants on natives’ wages is conditioned by trade integration and subsequent characteristics of an economy such as the level of granularity (i.e. the domination of large firms). WP3 will study, both theoretically and empirically, the political determinants of immigration policies across European countries toward different types of immigrants. It will also explore how the degree of substitution between natives and immigrants relates to the determination of immigration policies. WP4 will organise the research cooperation. The project includes researchers with strong complementarities which are required to achieve this project that emerges at the interface of migration economics, international trade and the political economy of immigration. While both teams will work on task allocation and production strategies (WP1) and at trade integration and aggregate issues (WP2), the German team will focus on immigration policies (WP3). Research efforts are set to happen as joint papers. We also expect an exchange of good practices on the use of the French and German employer-employee data. We will actively communicate on our results. Final results will be published in top-field/top-20 journals and research-based policy recommendations will be communicated through policy papers. Overall, the project will feed the public debate by providing a better understanding of the economic consequences of immigration in Europe.

It is now widely recognized that consideration for others plays a major role in many economic decisions. Indeed, economic analysis has developed behavioral models of social preferences that have explained, with relative success, many stylized facts. However, these models suffer from two significant blind spots. First, they primarily focus on consequentialist considerations and do not make room for procedural or deontological concerns. Second, they remain relatively silent on several critical dimensions of social decisions, such as the role of uncertainty and time, as well as autonomy and freedom. The issue is important because when these characteristics are present, the link between actions and consequences is looser than in the consequentialist framework. The AESOP project seeks to address these two issues by theoretically exploring and experimentally testing the question of social preferences when deontological motives are present, as well as when uncertainty, time, autonomy, and freedom of others are at stake. This project relies on three work-packages involve the theorization and experimentation of deontological preferences, the experimental observation of intertemporal social behaviors and behaviors in situations of uncertainty, as well as the testing of considering the autonomy and freedom of other individuals.

Uncertainty is pervasive. If this assertion is true for most decision problems, it is of particular importance for the economic policy related to climate change. In this case indeed, decisions to be made have global, long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences. The environmental challenge faced by humanity concerning global climate change therefore illustrates particularly well the importance of considering uncertainty when making a decision. Decisions concerning climate change have to be made in the presence of uncertainty concerning both the science of climate (due to the extreme complexity of the climate system) and some basic socio-economic and technology drivers (due to our inability to perfectly capture the way our socio-economic system would respond, mitigate and adapt to climate change). However, while it is now fully recognized that the presence of these uncertainties represents an essential datum of the climate change issue the way they are treated and integrated in the models we use to make predictions, or to design public policies remains unsatisfactory. The objective of the project is to propose new ways of incorporating preferences people have with respect to deep uncertainty in the decision making processes related to climate policy. INDUCED proposes to achieve this objective by addressing three challenges: (i) reviewing theoretically the properties of the alternative models that have been proposed to deal with deep uncertainty, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and their applicability in the specific context of climate change; (ii) studying the rationality of the alternative approaches and the intensity of deep uncertainty aversion that could be directly used in the process of decision making in the face of deep uncertainty; and (iii) investigating whether a contextual framework affects decision-makers. The project builds on two fundamental observations, which constitute its main intellectual drivers: • First observation: Choosing among different climate policies is essentially an exercise in risk management that has to be performed in a situation of deep uncertainty. It requires a decision making approach that is robust, in the sense that it does reasonably well across a wide range of distributions (or models), it is less sensitive to initial assumptions, it is valid for a wide range of futures, and it keeps options open. • Second observation: While it is increasingly recognized that individuals usually manifest aversion towards deep uncertainty, the extent to which deep uncertainty aversion exists and its prescriptive status is still an open question. In particular, very little has been said in the literature concerning the degree of deep uncertainty aversion or, how it compares to the degree of risk aversion, which is used in applied economic models. If one recognizes that alternative decision models may have better explanatory power, and are potentially able to provide better predictions and guidelines in situations of deep uncertainty, it becomes essential to have a more precise idea of what are the underlying properties of these alternative models. In particular, it is important to know the values of the parameters that should be used to make predictions and design optimal policies. The project aims at contributing to the debate on the way to address uncertainty in the context of climate change. This is of particular importance since the decisions to be made potentially have important consequences on the socio-economic environment and are associated with events that have never been encountered before.