Working papers



Can developed countries enforce that goods consumed domestically do not contribute to human rights violations in developing countries where they are sourced? This paper studies the enforcement of new due diligence policies, which constrain firms to curb foreign sourcing linked to human rights violations through transparency and reporting. I study the US Dodd-Frank Act Conflict Mineral Rule (2010), a limiting the use of conflict minerals extracted in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and adjoining countries in supply chains of US eletronic firms. The law increased administrative cost of complying firms, showing that subtantial regulatory constraints were created. I test how diligence obligations shaped exports of targeted countries, and whether they are circumvented through opaque territories called legal havens. Using a triple difference strategy and the structural gravity framework, I find that this policy decreased DRC and adjoining countries' exports of conflict minerals by 76%. One fourth of this decrease is due to circumvention through legal havens, which then re-export more intensively to countries hosting foreign suppliers of US-regulated firms.

   
I propose an imputation approach for Poisson-Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) to measure proportional treatment effects for staggered multiplicative difference-in-differences (DiD) models. TWFE (two-way fixed effect) linear estimators do not recover DiD estimates in the presence of staggered treatment. I show that this issue extends to TWFE PPML estimators. In the linear case, robust estimators exist to recover correct DiD estimates, but these approaches do not extend to PPML, as aggregation of lower level effects is challenging in the non-linear case. This paper develops an estimator robust to TWFE staggered bias for PPML. This estimator recovers a quantity with a similar interpretation as in the canonical 2-by-2 TWFE PPML model: the Ratio-of-Ratios.


Using a multi-country firm-level database matched with oil & gas production data, we find evidence of overbooking of windfall profits in tax havens. Relying on a triple difference-in-difference strategy, we find that a 1% increase in commodity prices leads to a 0.3% increase in non-upstream affiliates located in tax havens, but only an increase of 0.15% in non-upstream affiliates located in other countries, after controlling for sector specialization. Based on a new dataset on effective taxes paid by extractive firms worldwide, we further find that a 1% increase in commodity prices leads to a 0.3% increase in fiscal windfalls for states, with substantial heterogeneity across countries: rich source countries benefit from a higher proportional increase of their fiscal windfall than countries with a low state capacity during commodity price increases.




March 2023 version; Coverage: IGC blog


Work in progress


  •  Sanctions and State Capture in Myanmar. (with Matt Collin




Coordinated events



An initiative to connect Women doing Economics in Paris. 

  • ENS de Lyon - PhD meetings (academic years 2020-2022).