Shervin KARIMI, Ownership structure over the business cycle: Evidence from France, coécrit avec Simon Cornée et Veronique Thelen
This paper provides new evidence on the comparative behavior of the third and the for-profit sector over the business cycle. Third sector organizations, generally comprised of non-profit and co-operative organizations, have distinct ownership structures compared to standard for-profit firms. However, very little is known about the third sector sensitivity to economic fluctuations. Using a novel French dataset on the 2000-2019 period that allows to differentiate both sectors, we examine their number of establishments and employment behaviors. Results show that the cyclical sensitivity of the third sector and its two main sub-groups are systematically lower than the for-profit sector. These patterns are found to be independent of the business cycle and sector size variable used. Our analysis shows that organizations with democratic governance and limited profit distribution constraint have different sensitivities to changes in economic conditions.
Jacques MINLEND, European Low-Carbon Policy: Impact on fossil energy markets.
This paper proposes text-as-data methods relying on unsupervised machine learning algorithms applied to European Union (EU) law acts and newspapers. These are used to construct two monthly indices over a reference period 1997-2021: (i) First, a news-based index which underlies a conjunctural uncertainty about the international context in which the global energy and environment policy evolves (EnvPU). (ii) Second, a laws-based index which reflects structural changes of the European energy and environment regulations (EnvP). The main findings suggest both indices display, in some extent, a common evolutionary pattern around salient events in the history of the EU energy and environment policy. Moreover, EnvPU index appears to be more volatile and is driven in the short-run by EnvP index. Given the support of such a policy to carbon phase-out, we further examine, in what extent, each index relates to price uncertainty dynamics in fossil energy markets (oil, gas, and coal). As a result, we uncover that, an increase in news-based EnvPU index has a positive impact on price uncertainty of all fossil energy markets, the effect being stronger and more significant for gas and coal markets. In contrast, while an exogenous shock in laws-based EnvP index has a negative effect on price uncertainty in oil and gas markets, it tends to increase the coal price uncertainty. Overall, EnvP index depicts a stabilizing effect on fossil energy prices.