Au cours de ma thèse, j'ai mené des recherches macroéconomiques appliquées sur différents sujets, allant des effets de la polarisation des emplois sur la réallocation des travailleurs aux effets de la politique monétaire sur la structure du capital des entreprises et les décisions financières. Cette thèse recueille trois articles sur ces arguments. L'article principal de la thèse est mon job market paper. Ce travail m'a donné l'opportunité d'explorer en détail les effets du changement technologique sur la structure professionnelle des marchés du travail, mais aussi ses effets sur la réallocation des travailleurs entre les emplois et le processus de tri des compétences en emplois. En d'autres termes, l'article répond à ces questions: comment les travailleurs utilisent-ils l'échelle professionnelle lorsque l'innovation technologique change sa structure? Quelles sont leurs possibilités d'emploi, compte tenu de leurs compétences, lorsque la technologie change? Et quelles compétences les employeurs recherchent-ils? Cet argument m'a toujours intrigué, et sa pertinence attire actuellement l'attention des gouvernements et des décideurs dans de nombreuses économies développées. Ma recherche s'écarte de ces faits pour analyser quels sont les effets du changement technologique sur les travailleurs et les entreprises. En particulier, il montre -comme cela a déjà été documenté dans la littérature sur la polarisation des emplois- que l'innovation technologique remodèle la structure professionnelle de l'économie en détruisant certains types d'emplois. Cependant, je montre que l'innovation technologique modifie la demande de compétences dans chaque profession de manière à avoir des effets hétérogènes sur les travailleurs en termes de mobilité de la main-d'œuvre, d'opportunités d'emploi et de qualité de matching. En particulier, ce papier est le premier à montrer que la technologie - en provoquant la polarisation du marché du travail - déclenche de grands mouvements du haut vers le bas de l'échelle des emplois, de nombreux travailleurs finissant dans des professions moins rémunérées et moins qualifiées. Les effets du changement technologique sur les résultats et la dynamique du marché du travail sont également examinés dans le deuxième chapitre de cette thèse. En particulier, ce travail, en collaboration avec Joanne Tan, montre comment le changement technologique peut expliquer l'augmentation de la pénurie de main-d'œuvre (occupational shortage) et comment les différents segments du marché du travail y réagissent Dans le dernier chapitre de la thèse, je m'intéresse à la relation entre la politique monétaire et la décision de rachat d'actions. Ce sujet n'a aucun lien avec le précédent, mais j'ai toujours été intéressé par la façon dont les macro-variables peuvent influencer les décisions des gestionnaires au niveau micro. Dans ce travail, conjointement avec Assia Elgouacem, nous utilisons des données au niveau de l'entreprise et montrons que les sociétés américaines rachètent davantage leurs propres actions en période de politique monétaire accommodante, c'est-à-dire lorsque le coût de la dette est faible. En fait, nous montrons que si la courbe de rendement d'une entreprise s'ajuste dans la direction prévue par la politique monétaire, c'est-à-dire que le coût de la dette diminue, l'entreprise émettra davantage d'obligations pour lever des fonds à moindre coût. Cependant, ils vont utiliser la majeure partie de ces nouvelles liquidités pour financer un programme de rachat plutôt que d'investir dans de nouveaux capitaux et emplois. Cet effet d'éviction des rachats sur les nouveaux investissements et l'emploi suscite des doutes car il atténue la transmission de la politique monétaire. / During my PhD I conducted applied macroeconomic research on several different topics, spanning from the effects of job polarization on workers reallocation to the effects of monetary policy on firms capital structure and financial decisions. This thesis collects three articles on these arguments. The main article of the thesis is my job market paper. This work gave me the opportunity to explore in detail the effects of technological change on the occupational structure of labor markets, but also its effects on the reallocation of workers across jobs and the process of sorting skills to jobs. Or in other words, the paper answers these questions: how do workers use the job ladder when technological innovation changes its structure? What are their job opportunities, given their skills, when technology changes? And what skills do employers look for? This argument always intrigued me, and its relevance is raising the attention of governments and policy makers in many developed economics. My research departs from these facts to analyze what are the heterogeneous effects of technological change on workers and firms. In particular, it shows -as already documented in the literature on job polarization- that technological innovation reshapes the occupational structure of the economy by destroying some type of jobs. However I show that, at the same time, technological innovation changes the demand for skills in each occupation such that it has heterogeneous effects across workers in terms of labor mobility, job opportunities and match quality. In particular, this paper is the first to show that technology - by causing the polarization of the labor market- triggers large movements from the top to the bottom of the job ladder, with many workers ending up in lower paying and lower qualifying occupations just after the disruptive effects of technological change were consumed. The effects of technological change on labor market outcomes and dynamics is explored also in the second chapter of this thesis. In particular, this work, joint with Joanne Tan, shows how technological change can explain the raise of occupational shortage. More interestingly, it shows how different segments of the labor market react to occupational shortage. In the last chapter of the thesis, I turn my attention to the relationship of monetary policy and corporate decision of share repurchase. This topic is fully unrelated from the previous one, but I have always been interested on how macro-variables can influence managers decisions at micro level. In this work, joint with Assia Egouace, we use firm-level data and show that American corporations buyback more their own shares in period of accommodating monetary policy, i.e. when the cost of debt is low. In fact we show that if the yield curve of a firm adjusts in the direction predicted by monetary policy, i.e. the corporate cost of debt diminishes, the firm is going to issue more bonds to raise money at lower costs. However, they are going to use most of these new liquidity to finance a repurchase program rather than investing into new capital and employment. This crowding out effect of buybacks on new investment and employment casts doubts since it attenuates the transmission of monetary policy.

Cette thèse examine les thèmes d'appariement, de l'inégalité et de l'impact des changements technologiques sur le marché du travail. En particulier, elle aborde les questions sur l'appariement entre les salariés et les entreprises et comment cela influence les inégalités sur le marché du travail, à la fois dans la population entière, ainsi qu'entre les groupes démographiques et de compétences. Il examine également comment les changements technologiques affectent les conditions du marché du travail auxquelles sont confrontés les travailleurs et les entreprises. Ces questions sont abordées sur trois chapitres. Le premier chapitre, intitulé "Hétérogénéité multidimensionnelle et appariement dans un marché du travail frictionnel - une application à la polarisation" traite l'appariement des travailleurs aux entreprises selon des caractéristiques multidimensionnelles et quantifie l'impact du changement technologique sur l'évolution d'appariement, des salaires et de l'emploi de différents groupes démographiques. Je construis un modèle de recherche dirigée avec hétérogénéité multidimensionnelle et j'estime le modèle sur des données américaines. Je trouve que les complémentarités de production entre les compétences et les taches cognitives et interpersonnelles ont augmenté, par rapport à ceux-ci entre les compétences et les taches manuelles. Ce changement de technologie de production explique en grande partie la polarisation des salaires et des emplois aux Etats-Unis. De plus, même s'il ne tient pas compte des différences entre les sexes, le modèle peut expliquer une fraction substantielle du rétrécissement des écarts hommes-femmes des salaires et des emplois. Coécrit avec Nicolo Dalvit et Aseem Patel, le deuxième chapitre, intitulé "Hiérarchies intra-entreprises et disparité entre les sexes", étudient le classement des femmes dans les hiérarchies au sein des entreprises. Il utilise des données administratives françaises et examinent l'incidence des écarts de salaires et d'emploi à travers les hiérarchies au fil du temps. En outre, en exploitant une politique sur les quotas de conseil d'entreprise en France, il évalue l'impact d'une augmentation du leadership féminin sur les salaires et les résultats de l'emploi au sein des entreprises. Nous constatons que les hiérarchies comptent dans les écarts de salaires et d'emplois entre les sexes. Les écarts de salaires et d'emplois entre hommes et femmes augmentent avec chaque niveau de hiérarchie des entreprises, même si ces écarts se rétrécissent davantage au fil du temps dans les niveaux supérieurs. De plus, l'amélioration du leadership féminin a des impacts différents selon les hiérarchies. Tandis qu'une plus grande proportion de femmes membres du conseil d'administration réduit l'écart salarial entre les sexes dans les niveaux supérieures de la hiérarchie, elle n'a pas un tel impact sur les niveaux inférieurs. Au lieu de cela, il augmente la proportion de femmes dans les niveaux inférieures travaillant à temps partiel, au détriment de l'emploi à temps plein. Le contraire est vrai pour les femmes dans les niveaux supérieures. Le troisième chapitre, "Pénurie de main-d’œuvre et ajustements du marché du travail: une théorie des iles", coécrit avec Riccardo Zago, traite de l'incidence de la pénurie de main-d’œuvre et évalue si elle entraine des ajustements salariaux et salariaux. En utilisant des données uniques sur les postes vacants déclarés par les entreprises d'être difficile à pourvoir, nous documentons l'incidence de la pénurie entre les régions, les industries et les groupes professionnels. Nous constatons que la pénurie ne conduit qu'à des ajustements de salaires et d'emploi dans les professions non routinières, mais pas dans les professions routines. Nous montrons comment le déclin séculaire des occupations de routine, causé par le changement technologique, peut expliquer la persistance de la pénurie dans ce secteur et son incapacité à s'adapter. / This thesis examines the themes of sorting, inequality and the impact of technological change on the labor market. In particular, it addresses the questions of how workers sort within and between firms and how this influences labor market inequality, both in the workforce as a while, as well as between demographic and skill groups. It also considers how changes in technology affects the labor market conditions faced by workers and firms. These questions are tackled over three chapters. The first chapter, entitled `Multidimensional heterogeneity and matching in a frictional labor market - an application to polarization' deals with the sorting of workers to firms along multidimensional characteristics and quantifies the impact of technological change on the evolution of sorting patterns, wages and employment outcomes of different skill and demographic groups. I construct a model of directed search with two-sided multidimensional heterogeneity and estimate the model on US data. I find that production complementarities between cognitive and interpersonal skills and tasks have increased, relative to hat between manual skills and manual tasks. This change in production technology accounts for a large part of wage and job polarization in the US. Also, despite being gender-blind, the model can explain a substantial fraction of the narrowing of gender wage and job rank gaps from the 1980s to the present day. The second chapter, entitled `Intra-firm hierarchies and gender gaps' and coauthored with Nicolo Dalvit and Aseem Patel, studies the sorting of women into layers of hierarchy within firms, using administrative French data, and examines the incidence of gender wage and employment gaps across hierarchies over time. Further, by exploiting a policy on corporate board quotas in France, it assesses the impact of an increase in female leadership on gender wage and employment outcomes within firms. We find that hierarchies matter in gender wage and employment gaps. Gender wage and employment gaps increase with each layer of firm hierarchy, even if these gaps narrow more over time in the upper layers. In addition, improvements in top female leadership has differing impacts across hierarchies. While a greater share of female corporate board members narrows the gender wage gap in top layers of hierarchy, it has no such impact on lower layers. Instead, it increases the share of women in lower layers working part-time, at the expense of full-time employment. The opposite is true for women in upper layers. The third chapter, `Occupational Shortage and Labor Market Adjustments: a Theory of Islands', coauthored with Riccardo Zago, addresses the incidence of occupational shortage, and assesses whether it leads to wage and employment adjustments. Using a unique dataset on reported vacancies that firms find difficult to fill, we document the incidence of shortage across regions, industries and occupation groups. We find that shortage only leads to wage and employment adjustments in non-routine occupations, but not in routine occupations. We show how the secular decline of the routine occupations, caused by technological change, can account for the persistence in shortage in the routine sector and its inability to adjust.

This paper examines the effect of technological innovation in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics on unemployment levels in Sweden. The paper collects over 1350 AI and Robotics patents from 2010 to 2020 and carefully matches the patent applicant’s address with the respective municipality and county to construct a panel data set. The panel data is then used to analyze the relationship between unemployment and technological change across counties. The empirical design consists of Pooled Fixed Effects and Fixed Effects Models. The study finds a negative association between unemployment levels and AI and Robotics innovations in the former design and insignificant results in the latter.

On previous occasions in society when the labor market has changed due to new technology, there has been concern that people would lose their jobs. Over the past year, the development of various AI tools has emerged, which has affected people both in their personal lives and professional careers. By examining previous research in conjunction with interviewing individuals working as programmers, a depiction is presented of how the perception of AI looks within the specific professional role. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted, where individuals with different experiences and roles shared their perceptions of the development. The data from the interviews was analyzed and compared with the theory and previous research presented. The respondents' overall perception is positive, and they believed that AI would rather serve as an aid in their profession in the future. According to all respondents, the industry will undergo some changes, but primarily through streamlining and reducing manual work, rather than taking over their roles. Some of the respondents believed that AI could pose a threat to the programming profession, but it will take longer than ten years for that to happen.

The implementation of Artificial Intelligence has become more prevalent in organizations over the last decade. AI will cause a fundamental shift in an organization’s operating mode on a variety of dimensions such as: how work gets done, including the design of business and decision-making processes, the nature of interactions within organizations, the skills that employees need to develop, and how managers function, lead and operate in this new era of digitization and automation. Because of the rapid changes that AI will bring to organizations, effective management practices will still be essential and maybe even more necessary than in previous eras of technological change. Thus, there is an opportunity to uncover those specific managerial tasks, capabilities, and mindsets that will lead to AI being a useful tool at a micro-level. Because AI tools are relatively in the early stages of adoption, there is little to no academic research on the role of the manager. Therefore, it is a timely topic, and research can make an early (and potentially unique) contribution to the management literature. The critical question that this study will attempt to answer is the following: “How Will the Manager’s Role Change Due to the Implementation of Artificial Intelligence?” The study will primarily focus on managers who oversee administrative functions or processes and are currently leading teams or organizations implementing AI. This research will be a mixed-methods approach starting with interpretivist case examples of several organizations applying AI along with a quantitative survey that will collect objective data. / Business Administration/Interdisciplinary

Integrated Assessment Models (IAM)s play a key role in climate policy research; however, many IAMs are limited by their treatment of technological change. This is a particularly vexing limitation because technological change significantly affects the optimal carbon policy. We propose a means of incorporating technological change within the Dynamic Integrated Model of the Climate and Economy (DICE). We modify DICE to allow it to adjust the cost of CO2 abatement based on the demand for solar photovoltaic generating capacity. We find that deployment of solar photovoltaics (PV) is highly sensitive to returns to scale and the grid integration costs associated with PV intermittency. At low returns to scale integration costs cause PV to be deployed in steps, reducing the benefit of scale effects; at higher returns to scale PV is deployed smoothly but is arrested integration costs become significant; and when returns are high PV becomes so inexpensive that it’s deployed widely in spite of integration costs. The implication of this behavior is that the optimal allocation of research and development resources depends on returns to scale in the solar market: if returns to scale are low, R&D should focus on PV itself, while if they’re high, R&D should focus on reducing integration costs.

The resource curse, also known as the “paradox of plenty”, basically states that countries that have natural resources in abundance, particularly in terms of non-renewable resources such as oil and gas and minerals, in the long run tend to have less economic growth and prosperity, than countries with relatively lesser endowments of natural resources. This research investigates the case of the Chilean economy; its erstwhile saltpeter mining industry and current copper mining industry. The study attempts to answer the research question of whether Chile is still under the resource curse. Through the facts of the case study, semi-structured formal and informal interviews and extensive literature review, the researcher identified four main outcomes of the resource curse which are true to the Chilean history and current events; plundering of national wealth by political leaders, weak policy enforcements and military challenges to the government and the subsequent threats to the country’s democracy. The results of the case study suggest that, Chile is indeed still under the resource curse. The researcher draws on economic theory by Joseph Schumpeter in his most celebrated publication, “The theory of Economic Development” to gain understanding into the Chilean reality of economic under development and any other possible factors besides the resource curse, mainly lack of entrepreneurial ambitions by the human capital of the economy. The study contrasts, Schumpeter’s economic theory to Marxist economic theory of total control of nation states’ resources by governments and the Keynesian economic theory of government intervention aimed at supporting growth.

<p>In this thesis I explore dimensions through which changes in expectations can serve as a driver of business cycles in a rational expectations setting. Exploiting both the ``sunspot'' and ``news-shock'' approaches to expectations-driven business cycles, I use various theoretical models to investigate how changes in expectations may have played a role in macroeconomic events such as the technological revolution of the 1990's and the financial boom and bust of 2003-2008.</p> <p>In the first chapter, I explore the ability of a model with knowledge capital to generate business cycles driven by expectations of future movement in total factor productivity (TFP). I model knowledge capital as an input into production which is endogenously produced through a learning-by-doing process. When firms receive news of an impending productivity increase, the value of knowledge capital rises, inducing the firm to hire more hours to ``invest'' in knowledge capital. The rise in the value of knowledge capital immediately raises the value of the firm, causing an appreciation in stock prices. If the expected increase in productivity fails to materialize, the model generates a recession as well as a crash in the stock market.</p> <p>In the second chapter, I explore the extent to which expectations about innovations in the financial sector may have contributed to both the boom and bust associated with the ``Great Recession''. Making a connection between the ``boom-years'' of easy credit and the crises of 2008, I argue that agents' overly-optimistic expectations of the benefits associated with financial innovation led to a flood of liquidity in the financial sector, lowering interest rate spreads and facilitating the boom in asset prices and economic activity. When the events of 2007-2009 led to a re-evaluation of the effectiveness of these new products, agents revised their expectations regarding the actual efficiency gains available to the financial sector and this led to a withdrawal of liquidity from the financial system, a reversal in credit spreads and asset prices and a bust in real activity. Following the news-shock approach, I model the boom and bust cycle in terms of an expected future fall in the costs of bankruptcy which are eventually not realized. The build up in liquidity and economic activity in expectation of these efficiency gains is then abruptly reversed when agents' hopes are dashed. The model generates counter-cyclical movement in the spread between lending rates and the risk-free rate which is driven purely by expectations, even in the absence of any exogenous movement in bankruptcy costs as well as an endogenous rise and fall in asset prices and leverage.</p> <p>In the final chapter, I explore the extent to which a ``bout of optimism'' during a period of technological change such as the 1990's could produce not just a boom in consumption, investment and hours-worked, but also rapid growth in productivity itself. I present a theoretical model where the economy endogenously adopts the technological ideas of a slowly evolving technological frontier, and show that the presence of a ``technological gap'' between unadopted ideas and current productivity can lead to multiple equilibria and therefore the possibility that changes in beliefs can be self-fulfilling, often referred to as sunspots. In the model these sunspots take the form of beliefs about the value of adopting the new technological ideas, and unleash both a boom in aggregate quantities as well as eventual productivity growth, increasing the value of adoption and self-confirming the beliefs. In this sense, the model provides an alternative interpretation of the empirical news-based results that identify expectational booms that precede growth in TFP. Finally, I demonstrate that the scope for the indeterminacies is a function of the steady-state growth rate of the underlying frontier of technological ideas, and that during times of low growth in ideas or technological stagnation, the potential for indeterminacies and thus belief-driven productivity growth diminishes.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research project investigates individuals' resistance to change brought about by new information technology implementation in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. By understanding how individual participants resist and adapt to change, their resistance can be better accommodated by the organization in the adoption of new information technology within the AEC industry. This enables researchers and practitioners to understand how new technologies should be introduced within organizations. A social architecture factor model associated with impeding/promoting use of information technologies was created based on a literature review of change management theory on resistance to change and attitude-behavior connections. In Phase I of the research, the personality traits and behavioral characteristics individuals included in the original model were reduced to a smaller number of variables indicative of resistance to information technology change. A revised social architecture factor model was created after this reduction. The variable reduction and revised model were based on data collected from a 50-person sample of the AEC population. At the conclusion of Phase I, a Resistance to Change Index (RTCI) was created, enabling estimations of the intensity of resistance an individual is likely to exhibit using the personality traits and behavioral characteristics kept in the revised social architecture factor model. Phase II of the research investigated relationships between the RTCI and demographics of the individual using a 156-person sample of the AEC population. This phase of the research determined whether different demographic groups within the AEC population exhibited differences in their RTCI. The data analysis found several demographic groups that were different in their likelihood of resistance, including profession, gender, computer understanding and experience, and awareness of past or future changes occurring in their company. Age and education level were expected to have relationships with RTCI, based on industry stereotypes. The data analysis found that these stereotypes have no scientific basis. Two other stereotypes, gender and computer understanding and experience, were supported by the data analysis, however. / Ph. D.

L’investissement en matière de systèmes d’information (SI) constitue un enjeu fondamental de développement des organisations mais également un risque considérable, compte tenu des probabilités d’échecs de ce type de projet. La prise en compte du facteur humain est une composante essentielle de la réussite d’un projet SI, devant être considérée comme partie intégrante du processus d’innovation. Appliqué au domaine des Systèmes de Transport Intelligents (ITS), ce travail de recherche s’est évertué à proposer une démarche intégrant l’activité humaine et ses transformations au cœur du processus de conduite de projet SI. Son objectif était de fournir à l’association ITS Bretagne un canevas d’intervention permettant de poser un diagnostic complet des besoins d’accompagnement d’une organisation, souhaitant intégrer un ITS, et de construire, à partir des résultats de ce diagnostic, un dispositif de conduite de changement adapté. Fondamentalement intégrative, la démarche élaborée s’appuie sur une opérationnalisation du processus de genèse instrumentale (Rabardel, 1995) – c’est-à-dire la transformation mutuelle des composantes techniques et humaines d’un instrument – à des niveaux d’activités organisationnels, collectifs et individuels. Elle s’inscrit de manière transversale et continue au sein des trois temps d’analyse des usages : l’acceptabilité, l’acceptation et l’appropriation. Sa mise en œuvre dans le cadre d’un projet pilote, au sein de la chaîne logistique d’un industriel français, a permis d’en démontrer sa faisabilité et sa pertinence, tout en ouvrant des champs de recherche quant à ses applications et développements futurs / Information System (IS) investment is a major issue for the development of organizations although it also represents a significant risk, regarding the failure probability of these kinds of projects. The Human Factor is a key component of successful IS projects, and must be considered as part of the innovation process. Applied to the field of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), this research work does its utmost to put forward an approach to integrate human activity and its transformation at the heart of IS project management processes. The goal of this research was to provide ITS Bretagne with an intervention framework, which would enable it to diagnosis what support would be needed by an organization which is planning to integrate an ITS. The results of this diagnosis would then be used to propose an appropriate change management procedure. Intrinsically integrative, the approach created in this research is based on the operationalization of the instrumental genesis process (Rabardel, 1995) – i.e. the mutual transformation of human and technical components of an instrument – at organizational, collective and individual activity levels. It works in a transversal and continuous way, throughout the three usage analysis stages: acceptability, acceptance and appropriation. The use of this intervention framework for an experimental project, within the logistic chain of a French manufacturer, enabled us to prove its feasibility and relevance, as well as opening up new fields of research concerning its future applications and development