Journée Doctorale 2021 du programme Politiques Publiques du CES

Abstract: In the sense of Spence (1973), education sends a signal to the labor market which helps to reveal the ability of former students. Delayed graduation is usually perceived as a negative signal, leading to lower wages and employment rates. This paper tests for the presence of heterogeneous effects of the signal sent by delayed graduation in higher education (post-high school diploma). These effects are measured on the rate of employment and average wages at individuals’ entry into the labor market. I analyze if the heterogeneous structure of the effects is conditional on individuals’ characteristics such as diploma, social origin, or gender. I use the generalized random forest algorithm with an instrumental setting to estimate individual Conditional Average Treatment Effects. In line with the literature, I find a negative effect of delayed graduation on the rate of employment. However, this effect is heterogeneous across individuals, ranging from -60% to -10%. As expected I find a subgroup with negative treatment effects on average wages, but also individuals benefiting from delayed graduation with a positive treatment effect. The individual treatment effects on monthly average wages range from -350€ to around 200€. Gender does not affect the heterogeneous effects on the rate of employment but does influence the effects on average wages. Study duration and field affect both indicators. The social origin (parents’ occupation) also plays a crucial role in determining the individual treatment effect on the rate of employment and average wages.

Abstract: The International Criminal Court (ICC) was launched in 2002 with the purpose of fighting impunity and deterring the commission of international crimes. In this paper, we investigate whether the ICC effectively deters ruling leaders and criminal groups under its jurisdiction from engaging in egregious violence against civilians. We exploit civilian killings data from a panel of 176 countries over the period 1989-2019 during which 123 countries incrementally decided to ratify the Rome Statute and recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, while others never did. Due to the strong suspicion of endogeneity of the ratification process, we rely on flexible panel data models with interactive fixed effects to account for potentially complex country-specific trends. We find no evidence of any deterrence in the full sample of countries. However, we find that the probability and intensity of civilian killings by non-governmental forces decreases quite substantially after ratification in high-risk countries, i.e. countries that were marked by civil violence and weak institutions in the 1990s. Conversely, civilian killings by governmental forces appear unaffected by the ICC even in high-risk countries, a pattern that is consistent with the institutional fragility of the Court.
Co-author: Benjamin Monnery, EconomiX