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We investigate wealth returns on an administrative panel containing the disaggregated balance sheets of Swedish residents. The expected return on household net wealth is strongly persistent, determined primarily by systematic risk, and increasing in net worth, exceeding the risk-free rate by the size of the equity premium for households in the top 0.01 percent. Idiosyncratic risk is transitory but generates substantial long-term dispersion in returns in top brackets. Systematic and idiosyncratic risk both drive the cross-sectional distribution of the geometric average return over a generation. Furthermore, wealth returns explain most of the historical increase in top wealth shares. (JEL D31, G11, G51)

International audience; We estimate the impact of French town hall elections held in mid-March 2020 on the mortality of 163,000 male candidates aged above 60. Their excess mortality during March and April was similar to the general population. We compare candidates in cities with two candidate lists to those in cities with only one list, as elections are more intense in contacts in the former group. We also use a regression discontinuity design and investigate mortality in 2020 depending on how candidates fared in the 2014 election. We cannot detect any causal effect of active participation in the 2020 elections on mortality.

Recent technological developments have led to a questioning of the intermediation activities of the dominant players in the music industry. After reorganizing their resources and competences, these players have redeployed their functions around 360° strategies. Among emerging technologies, the Blockchain is often presented as a disintermediation tool. Indeed, it allows information to be stored or transactions to be carried out without recourse to a central control body. Through a qualitative methodology, this article aims to propose a prospective analysis of the impact of the Blockchain on intermediation within the music industry.; Les évolutions technologiques récentes ont entraîné une remise en cause des activités d’intermédiation des acteurs dominants de l’industrie musicale. Après une réorganisation de leurs ressources et de leurs compétences, ces dernières ont su redéployer leurs fonctions autour de stratégies à 360°. Parmi les technologies émergentes, la blockchain est souvent présentée comme un outil de désintermédiation. En effet, elle permet de stocker des informations ou d’effectuer des transactions sans recourir à un organe central de contrôle. À l’aide d’une méthodologie qualitative, cet article propose une analyse prospective de l’impact de la blockchain sur l’intermédiation au sein de l’industrie musicale.

Using employer-employee level data linked to individual health records, we document that the incidence of stress, anxiety, depression, psychiatric medication usage, and even suicide increase following acquisitions. These effects are prevalent among employees from both targets and acquirers, in weak as well as in growing, profitable firms. Employees who experience negative career developments within the merging firms, 'blue-collar' workers, and employees with lower cognitive and non-cognitive skills are most affected. A variety of tests address endogeneity concerns, including an analysis exploiting failed mergers. Our findings point to mental illness as a significant non-pecuniary cost of acquisitions.

The digital revolution has significantly impacted the music industry by lowering barriers to entry. This change is usually depicted as endangering the big incumbent firms, the so-called ‘Majors’ (Universal, Sony, and Warner). Yet, market indicators show that the majors’ leadership has not declined. In part thanks to the application of a 360° business model made possible by digitization, they have been able to sustain their position. However, there is still a lack of theoretical account as well as empirical evidence for understanding how this model has been implemented by the Majors. This paper uses the concept of transactional capabilities in order to explain this switch towards 360° business model : majors have relied on a new type of competences, more oriented towards the completion of multiple transactions in parallel with heterogeneous actors. We illustrate this point with the case study of the French arm of Sony Music Entertainment.

We show that close votes on shareholder proposals are disproportionately more likely to be won by management than by shareholder activists. Using a sample of shareholder proposals from 2003 to 2016, we uncover a large and discontinuous drop in the density of voting results at the 50% threshold. We document similar patterns for say on pay votes and director elections. Our findings imply that shareholder influence through voting is limited by managerial opposition. It also follows that one cannot routinely use an RDD to identify the causal effects of changes in corporate governance generated by shareholder votes. Received May 29, 2017; editorial decision August 21, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We investigate the impact of wealth taxation on the behavior of entrepreneurs in France. Before 2018, business sales triggered the conversion of tax-exempt business assets into taxable wealth. Using personal tax data, we confirm that retirement of entrepreneurs leads to large annual wealth tax payments. There is no evidence of higher expatriation by entrepreneurs following retirement, but their take-up of tax-favored investments in SMEs increases. The elasticity of such investments to the tax increase is far higher than for charity donations. These investments fall after financial wealth becomes tax-exempt in 2018. This evidence suggests that a wealth tax, combined with tax-favored investment schemes, may have encouraged former entrepreneurs to reinvest their wealth in SMEs.

We estimate the tax elasticity of dividends using two recent French re- forms: a hike in the dividend tax rate followed, five years later, by a cut. To follow the cash movements within the balance sheets of households and firms caused by these reforms, we use newly-accessible personal and cor- porate tax registries. Following the tax increase, the elasticity of dividends equals four and there is no shifting towards other personal income cate- gories. We find instead an increase in companies’ spending. After the tax decrease, payouts revert to their initial level, but not enough to offset the amounts received during the high-tax period.

This paper assesses how CEO transitions shape labor contracts within firms. We argue that family links between a new CEO and his predecessor act as a commitment device for upholding implicit contracts with the workforce. Consistent with this view, we find evidence of a wage insurance mechanism during a CEO transition. Dynastically-promoted CEOs relative to external CEOs are associated with up to 25% less job separations and 20% lower wage growth. Crucially, we show that differences, in terms of job separations, between dynastic and non-dynastic CEO successions are significantly greater when labor markets are more frictional.

We ask whether public financial aid reduces small businesses’ credit constraints. To answer the question, we analyze a policy of bank loans made from subsidized funds. Extensions of this large program are plausibly exogenous and help identify its effects. Using firm-level data, we find that the program substantially increases debt financing without substitution between subsidized and unsubsidized finance. Returns on subsidized debt are significantly above its market cost, with no subsequent surge in default risk. We interpret this as evidence that targeted firms are credit-constrained and underline the implied welfare differences between upfront financial aid and public guarantees.

This paper investigates the channels through which saving flows impact the dynamics of wealth inequality. The analysis relies on an administrative panel that reports the assets and income of every Swedish resident at the yearly frequency. We document that the saving rate, defined as saving from labor income divided by net worth, is on average a decreasing function of net worth itself. The saving rate is also highly heterogeneous within net worth brackets. Heterogeneity across and within net worth brackets have conflicting effects on wealth inequality. As a result, saving rate heterogeneity is measured to have a strong impact on social mobility but only a weak impact on the distribution of net worth. Heterogeneity in wealth return is instead the main driver of the recent increase in top wealth shares.

International audience; This paper presents a specific approach in the field of evaluating the effects of publicly supported R&D activities: the BETA approach. Initially developed for application to large technology procurement/agency driven public R&D programmes, it has been adapted to a larger range of programmes supporting science and technology. The BETA approach consists of identifying and retrospectively measuring, at the micro-level via direct interviews, the impact of different types of learning processes triggered by participation in R&D. A further adaptation to the specific case of research infrastructures was conducted in the frame of the EvaRIO project. It also dealt with learning processes from an ex post and micro-level perspective, but covered a wider variety of activities and actors over time, leading to a broader view of effects. Based on 30 years of impact evaluation experience, we argue that the revised BETA approach, despite its focus on the economic dimension of impacts, is at the intersection between different strands of evaluation research. The dual nature of the BETA approach is examined along several dimensions including an output versus process perspective, project versus organization scope, qualitative versus quantitative investigation, contribution versus attribution issues, private profitability versus public value perspective, etc. We show that the BETA-EvaRIO method can be used to complement other evaluation methodologies and can be considered as bridging among them, or can be seen as a single, specific approach.

Cet article mesure l’effet des transmissions d’entreprise hereditaires sur la performance des entreprises transmises en France. Nous comparons les performances comptables des entreprises avant et apres la transmission, puis nous estimons l’impact du type de transmission sur la probabilite de faillite. Apres avoir construit une base originale sur les successions de dirigeants d’entreprises francaises, nous pouvons attribuer environ 20 % des faillites suivant une transmission aux successions familiales.

In this paper, we show that since 2003 there have been 75% more shareholder proposals rejected by a margin of one percent of shares outstanding than proposals that were approved by a similarly narrow margin. As a result, there is a large and discontinuous drop in the density of voting results on these proposals exactly where the majority threshold of each proposal is located. Using counterfactual distributions, we estimate that 11% of closely-contested proposals that were eventually rejected by voters would have passed if management had not been able to systematically affect the voting results. These results confirm that management holds vast and exclusive powers over the voting process at big US corporations and imply that these powers are used by entrenched managers to block valuable improvements to corporate governance. Our findings also have important implications for empirical researchers in corporate governance who use RDD to identify causal effects of corporate governance.

The issue of technology transfer (TT) activities from science to the economy is attracting more and more attention, becoming one of the main foci of the fast growing field of economics of science. As often when a new field of research is emerging, the issue of the relevance of the related indicators is of key importance. This paper uses the study of TT activities in the French public-research system, conducted by BETA in 2005–2006 to analyze some aspects of this issue. After presenting the main results of the study a more global discussion focuses on the interactions between the institutional and organization context of TT activities, the design of the indicators, the methodological choices related to data collection, and the implicit or explicit goals pursued when using TT indicators. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

This paper empirically investigates the portfolios of wealthy households and their implications for the dynamics of inequality. Using an administrative panel of all Swedish residents, we document that returns on financial wealth are on average 4% higher per year for households in the top 1% compared to the median household. These high average returns are primarily compensations for high levels of systematic risk. Abnormal risk-adjusted returns, linked for instance to informational advantages or exceptional investment skill, contribute only marginally to the high returns of the wealthy. Implications for inequality dynamics and public policy are discussed.

The conventional wisdom is that dynastic control provides sharp incentives to entrepreneurs ex-ante, when founders run firms in anticipation of their progeny being in charge once they retire, and bad management ex-post, when untalented heirs take over. Using data on Swedish private firms and the individuals who control them, I construct a cross-sectional measure of owners’ dynastic intentions based on the presence in the board of children of the current chairman, and provide instruments for dynastic control using the main owner’s family characteristics. Dynastic intentions make it three times less likely that the firm will be taken over by outsiders in the future and they also immediately lead to less delegation of management to outsiders. Yet, my estimations rule out any first-order effect, positive or negative, of dynastic control on firm profitability.

This article presents the results and lessons learned from a series of studies carried out by the BETA research team (University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, France) to measure the spin-offs and technological transfers that resulted from European space programs. Beyond the quantitative results that are analyzed in detail, the article examines some of the main qualitative characteristics that shape the technology transfer process generated by these programs. In particular, it is demonstrated that three main characteristics have a significant impact on the technology transfer process: the nature of the technologies at stake (their degree of maturity, their degree of diversity, the extent to which they are generic or specific), the nature of the network of participants to the programs (the degree of mutual trust, the existence of absorptive capabilities) and the nature of the organizational structure of those firms which participated in the projects (their degree of decentralization, their degree of vertical integration).

Résumé : Cet article a pour objectif d’analyser les mécanismes selon lesquels une grande Infrastructure de Recherche, ici un synchrotron, co-construit l’écosystème dans lequel elle s’insère et l’utilise pour soutenir et nourrir sa dynamique d’innovation. Notre analyse se fonde sur l’étude du synchrotron français SOLEIL. Nous postulons qu’il est possible d’analyser le modèle d’affaires d’une telle infrastructure, et surtout de comprendre les mécanismes de son évolution. Si celle-ci résulte de processus de résolution de tensions repérables au niveau micro­économique, les mécanismes à l’œuvre mettent en jeu des dynamiques de coopération et de compétition opérant par l’intermédiaire des différentes communautés au sein d’un écosystème de synchrotrons. Abstract : This article aims at analysing the mechanisms by which a large Research Infrastructure, here a synchrotron, co-constructs the ecosystem to which it belongs and uses it in order to sustain and feed its own evolution dynamics. Our analysis relies on the study of the French synchrotron SOLEIL. We hypothesize that it is possible to analyse the business model of such an infrastructure, and more importantly to explain the mechanisms of its evolution. Evolution results both from processes of tension solving at the microeconomic level and from dynamics of competition and cooperation operating through the various communities at play within the ecosystem of synchrotrons.

Better mechanisms are needed for evaluating important market and non-market effects of large technological programmes that are not properly captured by existing methods. This paper presents a framework that permits the direct and indirect economic effects from large R&D programmes to be separated. Petrobras' Deepwater Programme (Procap 1000) is used as a study-case because of its high technological content, and its great importance for oil production in Brazil. A sample of 27 projects from the programme over 23 years indicated an overall effect/cost ratio of 12.2 up to 1997, confirming the importance of R&D expenditure for economic growth. Learning obtained during the project's execution (indirect effect) was unexpectedly significant with an effect/cost ratio of 4.38 up to 1997. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The main objective of the paper is to analyze to which extent participation in public programs supporting collaborative R&D meets the goals pursued by policy makers when setting up such instruments. Theoretically, these policy instruments are designed to overcome a set of failures (market and systemic failures) impeding the innovation process. We use as an example in the empirical part the European Framework Programs (FP) 5 and 6, which include a large and representative range of instruments. Each of these FP instruments is characterized according to the set of failures it is supposed to solve, its objectives and characteristics, and we discuss how these aspects are perceived and exploited by participating companies. Using data collected in the Innoimpact survey, involving thousands of FP5 and FP6 project participants, we compare the motivations of firms in choosing these instruments with our theoretical predictions. We find that the motivation to participate in a FP project does not differ greatly from one instrument to the other and the characteristics of the projects do not exhibit major differences. The paper concludes with some policy recommendations. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

International audience

Strong corporate governance may bear some costs to shareholders when it leads to the departure of value-enhancing CEOs out of disagreement with the board. We test this hypothesis using the passing of shareholder proposals related to anti-takeover provisions in closely contested votes as a natural experiment. We measure the quality of a CEO departure by the cumulative abnormal returns observed around the announcement of such an event. We find that the approval of such proposals by general assemblies very significantly increases the likelihood that the current CEO leaves at the expense of firm value. Moreover, CEO departures provoked by stronger governance are not followed by an improvement in operating performance. We interpret this as evidence that the indiscriminate lifting of anti-takeover provisions is detrimental to shareholder value due to its adverse impact on the allocation of CEOs to firms.

Special Section on Heterogeneity and University-Industry Relations.-- et al., This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the European university landscape according to the following dimensions: history/foundation of university, dynamics of growth, specialization pattern, subject mix, funding composition, offer profile and productivity. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved., Funding support by the European Commission through the PRIME Network of Excellence – Aquameth project (coordinated by Andrea Bonaccorsi and Cinzia Daraio) is gratefully acknowledged.

The methodology developed by the Bureau d'Economie Theorique et Appliquee (BETA) for the economic evaluation of the indirect effects of large public R&D programmes is described, with special reference to space projects. It is designed to provide a minimal estimation, with the use of direct interviews with the managers of firms and taking into account a large range of possible indirect effects. One of the main values of the approach is to place intangible effects alongside those of a purely quantitative kind. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Bach Laurent, Lambert Gilles. Les règles de fonctionnement du programme spatial européen : analyse des facteurs d'intégration et de variété industrielles. In: Revue d'économie industrielle, vol. 59, 1er trimestre 1992. Diversité technologique et cohérence en Europe. pp. 154-173.

We study how, at times of CEO transitions, the identity of the CEO successor shapes labor contracts within family firms. We propose an alternate view of how family management might underperform relative to external management in family firms. The idea developed in this paper is that, in contrast to external professionals, CEOs promoted from within the family not only inherit control of the firm but also inherit a set of implicit contracts that affects their ability to restructure the firm. Consistent with our dynastic commitment hypothesis, we find that family-promoted CEOs are associated with lower turnover of the workforce, lower wage renegotiation, and greater loyalty for the incumbent workforce.

We study how, at times of CEO transitions, the identity of the CEO successor shapes labor contracts within family firms. We propose an alternate view of how family management might underperform relative to external management in family firms. The idea developed in this paper is that, in contrast to external professionals, CEOs promoted from within the family not only inherit control of the firm but also inherit a set of implicit contracts that affects their ability to restructure the firm. Consistent with our dynastic commitment hypothesis, we find that family-promoted CEOs are associated with lower turnover of the workforce, lower wage renegotiation, and greater loyalty for the incumbent workforce.

As the number and variety of forms of public actions supporting Science, Technology and Innovation (STI ii) very simplistic, but complex and theoretically grounded evaluation tools are being applied; and iii) apparently new approaches are being taken to addressing the same problems and questions that have already been addressed and analysed in other works, while at the same time new and crucial issues related to ST&I processes are being neglected. There is, thus, some discrepancy between the fields of evaluation studies and ST&I analysis. Broadly speaking, a lot of these new issues are emerging because ST&I processes are increasingly resulting from the collaborative activities of various actors.

Este trabalho discute as “fronteiras” da avaliação de políticas públicas e os desafios que a avaliação enfrenta no contexto europeu, mais precisamente na avaliação do impacto das políticas da Comissão Europeia em Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (CTI). A análise baseia-se em relatórios e congressos recentes nesse campo nos últimos três anos, em grande parte das pesquisas sobre avaliação efetuadas nos últimos 20 anos na Europa e nos 20 anos de experiência do autor nessa área. São apresentadas noções diferentes de fronteira para realçar as relações entre o “mundo da avaliação”, os formuladores de políticas públicas, os processos de construção dessas políticas, os atores e processos de CTI e as demais disciplinas de ciências sociais ligadas à avaliação. O trabalho conclui que a exploração da diversidade de abordagens, das partes interessadas, dos campos de pesquisa e de estudos empíricos oferece grande potencial para se lidar com a diversidade de fronteiras.

La propriété intellectuelle (PI) joue un rôle stratégique dans les industries créatives où la créativité est un processus collectif impliquant des acteurs aux intérêts contradictoires, conduisant à un “dilemne de la PI”. Les firmes veulent s’approprier le travail créatif et lutter contre l’imitation; les communautés créatives souhaitent un régime de PI souple pour recombiner les créations passées et générer des nouveautés; les individus sont entre ces deux extrêmes. Des arrangements spécifiques sont alors développés (comme des pratiques d’open source ou de creative commons) pour concilier appropriation et création. Les industries de la musique et des jeux vidéo illustrent ces phénomènes., Intellectual property rights (IPR) play a strategic role in creative industries. Defined as a collective process, creativity involves actors with contradictory IPR needs. This leads to an “IPR dilemna”. Firms are looking into appropriating creative work and prevent imitation; whereas creative communities need a weak IPR to combine past work and generate novelty. It becomes problematic for individuals to find themselves between these two. As a result, actors are developing specific IPR arrangements (e.g. open source and creative commons practices) to preserve the balance between appropriation and openness allowing creation. Two creative industries are used as illustrations: music and video-games., Los derechos propiedad intelectual (DPI) juegan un rol estratégico en las industrias creativas definidas por un proceso colectivo que involucra diferentes actores cuyos intereses en los DPI son contradictorios. Mientras las firmas buscan apropiarse su trabajo creativo y prevenir la imitación, las comunidades creativas necesitan DPI débiles para poder combinar trabajos pasados y generar novedades. Por lo tanto actores encuentran dificultades para identificarse con una de estas categorías. En consecuencia, estos desarrollan acuerdos específicos de DPI para preservar un equilibrio entre apropiación y apertura que les permita crear. Dos industrias creativas ilustran un ejemplo: la música y los video juegos.