Pierre Cahuc is a French economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. He is Program Director for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics's programme "Labour Markets" and research fellow at CEPR. His research focuses mainly on labour economics and its relationship with macroeconomics. In 2001, he was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economic research. He belongs to the most highly cited economists in France and Europe's leading labour economists.
Pierre Cahuc's research focuses mainly on labour economics. He has written books on the economics of salary negotiations, the reduction of working time, unemployment in France, social security, job flows, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, vocational education, economic debate, and social trust; his book on this last topic, The Society of Defiance written with Yann Algan, documents how distrust between French citizens among each other as well as with regard to the market economy and government has been growing since the 1990s, eroding civic behaviour, and argues that this growing distrust is both due and in turn fuels French corporatism, wherein the government regulates large aspects of citizens' lives. Together with André Zylberberg and Stéphane Carcillo, he has written several textbooks on labour economics aimed at graduate students. According to IDEAS/RePEc, Cahuc ranks among the top 2% of research economists worldwide. In his research, he has frequently collaborated with Yann Algan, Stéphane Carcillo, André Zylberberg and Fabien Postel-Visnay. Key findings of his research include the following:
Differences in inherited trust explain a substantial share of the differences in per capita incomes between countries ; the strength of that result was later questioned by Müller, Torgler, and Uslaner.
Government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with measures of trust, suggesting that distrust creates public demand for regulation and regulation in turn discourages the formation of trust.
The combination of temporary jobs and employment protection policies, while beneficial to a majority of employees if company ownership is sufficiently concentrate, likely increases unemployment by raising firms' job turnover, as employers face incentives to reduce firing costs by limiting employees' tenure.
The relative lack of competition between French employers for low-skilled and medium-skilled workers explains these groups' lack of wage bargaining power.
Civic attitudes and the design of unemployment benefits and employment protection in the OECD over the 1980s and 1990s are strongly correlated, suggesting that differences in civic virtue drive differences in labour market institutions.
Individuals with strong family ties are less geographically mobile, have lower wages and are more likely to be unemployed, and support more stringent labour market regulations.
Spain could have kept its unemployment rate below 15% during the Great Recession if it had adopted French employment protection legislation and thereby restricted the use of temporary contracts, thus avoiding the amplification of the effect of the gap between the firing costs of permanent and temporary contracts.
If job search intensity and wages are endogenous and the tax rate constant, then a more degressive time sequence of unemployment benefits may increase wage pressure and, by extension, increase unemployment.
Public employment in the OECD is found to crowd out private sector employment, depresses labour force participation and increases unemployment.
