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.
- Proportional Treatment Effects in Staggered Settings: An Approach for Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood. [Slides]
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)
Who benefits from commodity price shocks? This paper studies the geographic allocation of extractive MNEs profits linked to prices shocks - usually called windfall profits. We combine new administrative data on the worldwide activity of MNEs with exhaustive oil, gas and mining production data at the firm level. We show that extractive MNEs generate one third of their profits in non-extractive countries, and that profitability and effective tax rates display a U-shaped relationship in this sector. We identify the allocation of windfalls by leveraging differences in (i) the product specialization of extractive firms and (ii) commodity price changes, in a shift-share design.We provide evidence of overbooking of windfall profits in low-tax countries. For 1$ increase in consolidated windfall profits, we observe a 0.2$ increase in tax havens, 0.8$ in extractive affiliates and no increase in the rest of the group. We derive implications for government revenues using new stylized facts on effective tax rates in the extractive sector drawn from our data.
- Pipelines or pyramids: unequal progress and barriers for women in economics. (with Ondine Berland and Oliver Harman)
Work in progress
- Sanctions and State Capture in Myanmar. (with Matt Collin)
- The Corporate Taxation of Green and Brown Firms. (with Pierre Bachas, Kieran Byrne, Idann Gidron, Sanelisiwe Hlatshwayo, Mathieu Parenti)
Coordinated events
- EU Tax Observatory lunch seminar with Léo Czajka (2024-2026).
- WEPS.
- ENS de Lyon - PhD meetings (academic years 2020-2022).
- CEPS online seminar with Sébastien Laffitte (spring 2020).