Working papers
- No blood in my mobile: regulating foreign suppliers. [JMP]
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 in developed countries to prevent human rights violations involvement of their foreign suppliers. I study the US Dodd-Frank Act Conflict Mineral Rule (2010), a law targeting specific conflict minerals extracted in DRC and adjoining countries. I explore how diligence obligations have affected the regulated source countries’ access to international markets and whether diligence is circumvented through legal havens. Comparing targeted bilateral trade flows to non-targeted products and exporters within the structural gravity framework, I find that this policy decreased DRC and adjoining countries’ exports in value of 3T products by 72%. But this new extraterritorial rule has unintended consequences: I estimate that 38% of exports are diverted to opaque countries, called legal havens after the law is implemented. Exports are then redirected to countries hosting suppliers of US-regulated firms. Looking at US firms’ reactions, I show that sales drop, while administrative costs increase at the time of the law.
- Proportional Treatment Effects in Staggered Settings: An Approach for Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood. [Slides][Code]
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.
- The global allocation of extractive windfalls. (with Alice Chiocchetti)
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.
- Legal opacity and legal havens database.
- Pipelines or pyramids: unequal progress and barriers for women in economics. (with Ondine Berland and Oliver Harman)
Coordinated events
- EU Tax Observatory lunch seminar with Léo Czajka (2024-2025).
- WEPS.
- ENS de Lyon - PhD meetings (academic years 2020-2022).
- CEPS online seminar with Sébastien Laffitte (spring 2020).