Three essays on labor market policy and wages : institutional design and effects[Trois essais sur politiques du marché du travail et salaires : design institutionnel et impact]

In this dissertation, I aim to advance knowledge on how institutional design shapes the impact of two types of labor market policies on wages.Unemployment insurance (UI) benefits are commonly thought of as an alternative to income from employment, leading to the assertion that more generous UI exerts upward pressure on reservation wages and reduces labor supply. However, (1) prior employment requirements to gain entitlement imply that ineligible workers' incentives are the opposite of eligible workers' incentives, translating into an entitlement effect, and (2) the prospect of benefit exhaustion implies that eligible workers do not regard UI benefits as a long-term alternative to income from employment. In Chapter 1, I empirically estimate wage effects of UI benefits using a reform in Austria, separately for eligible and ineligible individuals, thereby addressing overlooked aspects of an existing puzzle in the literature. In Chapter 2, I show that a workhorse model in labor economics, enriched with features mirroring entitlement rules and calibrated to France, predicts that an increase in UI benefits raises unemployment an order of magnitude less than an equivalent increase in unemployment income for all unemployed, thus qualifying concerns about the negative impact of UI on the labor market.The existence of gender differences in pay premia within firms has motivated a wave of pay transparency reforms across high-income countries. Despite their rapid adoption, empirical evidence points to limited effectiveness. In Chapter 3, together with Federica Meluzzi, we study the impact of a novel affirmative action policy introduced in France in 2019, which requires all firms to compute and publish a composite Gender Equality Index and imposes a payroll-proportional tax on firms scoring below a regulatory threshold. We find that the policy's impact on its central objective-reducing gender pay disparities-was negligible. We propose regulatory leniency and the design of the indicator as likely explanations for the missing incentives.