Cette thèse étudie la formation des familles, leur organisation et les systèmes d’éducation. Les deux premiers chapitres traitent du choix du conjoint et du partage des ressources au sein du couple. Je modélise tout d’abord comment les individus se rencontrent et décident de se mettre en couple ou non en fonction de leur niveau d’éducation, de leur revenu et leur apparence physique. J’utilise des données américaines où j’observe qui est marié avec qui et pour combien de temps, ce qui me permet d’identifier les préférences des individus. Le deuxième chapitre analyse les effets du mariage sur certaines tendances économiques comme les inégalités de revenu ou les offres de travail. Dans ce chapitre, les personnes en couple se partagent leur revenu et choisissent ensemble la meilleure organisation pour travailler et accomplir les taches domestiques et élever les enfants. Avec des données britanniques, j’identifie les transferts de revenu qui existent entre les hommes et les femmes et je montre que ces transferts augmentent le travail des hommes mariés et diminuent celui des femmes mariées. Les deux derniers chapitres étudient l’efficacité du collège français et notamment la pratique du redoublement. Le troisième chapitre mobilise des méthodes de décomposition pour évaluer dans quelle mesure la baisse des scores des élèves français aux tests PISA peut être attribuée à des changements dans les caractéristiques des élèves ou à des changements dans les rendements de l’éducation. Enfin, le dernier chapitre se concentre particulièrement sur le redoublement et utilise des données de panel sur les collégiens français pour évaluer l’impact du redoublement sur leurs résultats. / This dissertation deals with family formation, family organization and education systems. The first two chapters study how people choose their partners and how they share their income. First, I focus on couple formation and I model how people meet and decide to match or not. People can choose their partner according to their education level, their wage and their physical attractiveness. Using American data, I observe who matches with whom and who stays single and for how long to recover the preferences of individuals in terms of mating. The second chapter attempts to understand how the efficiency and the sorting of the marriage market could impact economic outcomes such as income inequalities or labor supplies. In this chapter, when people marry, they share their income and decide how much each of them will work on the market and at home to raise children or do the housework. Using British data, I recover the amount of monetary transfers which exist between household members and show that these transfers make married women work less on the market and married men work more. The last two chapters of this dissertation focus on the French education system and on the impact of grade retention policies. In the third chapter I use decomposition methods to assess to which extent the decrease in French student’s score at PISA tests can be attributed to the changes in student’s characteristics or to the changes in school returns. Finally, in the last chapter, I use an estimation strategy to get rid of this selection effect and we use a panel data on French High School students to evaluate the impact of grade retention on their scores.

This dissertation deals with consumption in Swedish households between 1913 and 2001. More specifically, it asks whose resources matter most in determining consumption patterns. As a second question, the dissertation also attempts to establish whether the fact that simple covariance between a spouse’s background variables implies that the spouse has any influence at all over the household’s consumption decisions. The theoretical background is mostly drawn from literature regarding intra-household allocations: on the one hand cooperative game theory and on the other hand sociological theory. Cooperative game theory establishes influence, say or power within the household as a function of the marriage’s or cohabitation’s alternative cost, i.e., the difference between the utility level for a married or cohabiting person as opposed to a single person. Sociological theory considers the contribution one makes to the total level of utility in the household, whether in the form of monetary income, household work or as something else. This is in part conceptualized as a difference between exit and voice. The dissertation’s statistical analysis uses three surveys of household expenditure conducted in 1913, 1952 and 1999-2001. They give us an excellent picture of what they actually purchased during that year. The sample sizes are 552, 596 and 3,501, respectively. The dissertation’s main result is that human capital is a previously underestimated determinant of influence in consumption decisions. As the female stock of human capital increases, so does her influence over the household’s consumption decisions. In an attempt to determine the level of democracy within households, the dissertation uses a complementary data source: a questionnaire called “The Swedish People 1955”. Here, one of the questions directed to females was whether they checked with their husbands before deciding on a purchase, as a measure of intra-household democracy. This was then regressed upon the female share of total income, ideological position and two forms of human capital, one general and one for household work. Both forms of human capital lead to democratic households, which is taken to mean that human capital is important not only because it increases labor opportunities in the event of divorce (exit) but also because it increases female voice.

Une des marques du développement est la résorption du décalage entre la distribution spatiale de l’activité économique et celle de la population. Cette thèse étudie les conséquences d’une telle résorption sous l’effet de la migration ou d’une redistribution géographique de l’activité économique. Le premier chapitre s’intéresse à la relation entre migrants internationaux et foyers d’origine. Il met en lumière l’importance, pour les envois de fonds et les investissements, des croyances des migrants et de l’asymétrie d’information, aggravée par la distance, entre migrants et destinataires de ces envois. Le deuxième chapitre explore la transformation de l’économie d’accueil sous l’effet d’un afflux de migrants venus des campagnes en ville, en Chine. Il mesure d’abord leur impact sur le marché du travail à destination, puis examine comment ils affectent l’allocation des facteurs de production et les contraintes rencontrées par les entreprises sur les marchés du travail et du capital. Le troisième chapitre étudie l’impact sur le long terme d’un vaste programme d’industrialisation réalisé en Chine, et montre un retour de fortune. Ce renversement est imputé aux distorsions introduites sur le marché du travail local par la présence de grands complexes manufacturiers. Ce chapitre met en évidence le rôle de la migration pour surmonter ces imperfections et amener l’étape ultérieure de la transformation structurelle : le passage de l’industrie lourde à la production de biens de consommation et de services. / A key characteristic of the process of economic development is the shrinking spatial mismatch between economic activity and population. This thesis analyzes what happens when this spatial mismatch is reduced, as people’s places of residence and work or the geographical distribution of economic activity is altered. Chapter I deals with the relationship between international migrants and their households of origin. It sheds light on the importance for remittances and investments of migrants' beliefs and the information asymmetry between remittance senders and recipients that distance aggravates. Chapter II explores the transformation of the receiving economy due to an influx of rural-to-urban migrants in China. It first quantifies the effect of immigrants on the labor market at destination, and then investigates their impact on the reallocation of production factors and factor-market constraints faced by urban firms. Chapter III focuses on the long-term impact of a large industrialization plan in China. It reveals a reversal pattern due to the distortions in local labor markets induced by the presence of big plants. It highlights the role of migration in overcoming such imperfections and in bringing about the later stage of structural transformation—from heavy industry to consumption goods and services.