Research

Working papers

• Culture, human capital, and marital homogamy in France
  [link]
  Abstract

  What economic sacrifices are people willing to make to transmit their culture? Using data on religious affiliation in France, I study the intergenerational transmission of religion and how it interacts with children's educational outcomes. A reduced-form analysis suggests that mothers contribute to religious transmission more than fathers; religious minorities more than majorities; and lower-educated parents more than higher-educated ones. A mechanism that can explain these patterns is that higher-educated parents have a higher opportunity cost of transmitting their religion to their children. I investigate this mechanism through a structural model, in which parents endogenously decide their time investments in their child's culture on the one hand, and in their formal education on the other hand. The analysis suggests that heterogeneities in transmission patterns are driven primarily by heterogeneities in preferences for religious transmission across genders and religious groups, rather than by differences in parents' education. Furthermore, religious minorities pay a higher price for religious transmission in terms of their children's educational outcomes. For instance, by measuring this cost in terms of the probability that the child will obtain a college education, Muslim parents pay a cost between 8 and 13 times greater than that for Christians.

• Veiling and the economic integration of Muslim women in France
  (with Sébastien Montpetit) [link]
  Media coverage: Les Echos, Le Monde
  Abstract

  This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the economic costs of wearing the Islamic veil and on motives for veiling in a secular Western country. Using French observational data rather than small-scale interviews, we demonstrate a significant negative correlation between veiling and economic participation, even conditional on the respondent's religious environment. This newly-documented fact is not consistent with the existing economic theory of veiling in Muslim-majority countries, which has focused on the socio-religious signalling effect of veiling. We then show that a model which also accounts for reduced economic opportunities for veiled women is consistent with our findings in the Muslim-minority context. Using a structural interpretation of the model, we then disentangle the various motivations behind the joint decision to veil and to be economically active. Our findings indicate that veiled women are less economically active not due to religious preferences, but rather because veiling is costly on the labor market. Additionally, our results emphasize the significance of personal religious motives in the decision to veil, rather than signalling piety to others.

• The matching problem with linear transfers is equivalent to a hide-and-seek game
  (with Alfred Galichon) [link] [arXiv]
  
  Abstract

  Matching problems with linearly transferable utility (LTU) generalize the well-studied transferable utility (TU) case by relaxing the assumption that utility is transferred one-for-one within matched pairs. We show that LTU matching problems can be reframed as nonzero-sum games between two players, thus generalizing a result from von Neumann. The underlying linear programming structure of TU matching problems, however, is lost when moving to LTU. These results draw a new bridge between non-TU matching problems and the theory of bimatrix games, with consequences notably regarding the computation of stable outcomes.

Publications

• Sabine Nöbel, Antoine Jacquet, Guillaume Isabel, Arnaud Pocheville, Paul Seabright & Etienne Danchin
  "Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture"
  Biological Reviews, vol. 98, n. 1 (February 2023): pp. 132–149
  [open access article] [code]

Work in progress

• Are marriage markets segmented?
  Abstract

  This paper investigates the role of market segmentation in marital assortativeness, a feature traditionally attributed to variations in the surplus of potential matches within transferable utility models. I propose a modification to the Choo–Siow model, allowing individuals to be assigned to submarkets according to their gender and other relevant traits. This segmentation introduces a new explanation for spousal assortativeness, which is accompanied by a redistribution of surplus among partners compared to the original model. The significance of market segmentation is empirically examined by focusing on the termination of the mandatory military service in France in 1996, a quasi-natural experiment that arguably altered the structure of the marriage market. Preliminary event study analysis reveals an observable shift in educational homogamy post-termination, emphasizing the influence of market segmentation. Finally, I discuss the possibility of structurally estimating this extended model.

• A unifying framework for the stable coexistence of cultural traits
  Abstract

  I use the canonical evolutionary model of frequency-dependent selection to develop a unifying framework for the stable coexistence of cultural traits. First, I derive general theoretical results on population dynamics for some common cases, such as random matching or linear assortative matching. In a second step, I consider several examples from the economics and biology literatures, which document and provide reasons for the stable coexistence of cultural traits. I show that these examples can be seen as particular applications of the unifying framework that I propose. Such applications provide natural extensions to the baseline framework, and illustrate its flexibility.

Book chapters

• Alfred Galichon, Antoine Jacquet
  "Substitutability, equilibrium transport, and matching models"
  Prepared for the 2022 PIMS-IFDS-NSF summer school on optimal transport, University of Washington, Seattle, edited by Young-Heon Kim, Soumik Pal, and Brendan Pass
  [link] [arXiv]
  
• Antoine Jacquet, Aurélie Varrel, Audrey Richard-Ferroudji
  "Quand les migrants sont français : la population française de Pondichéry"
  Cahiers des IFRE 3, 2016: pp. 58–67
  [open access article]